Tue 24 Apr 2007
According to researchers chimps are better at subtizing than humans.
People have two counting faculties. We can “see” a handful of things and without knowing how many there are instantly - this is called subitizing. The other way of counting is enumerating - counting up individual numbers. We can subitize up to about four or five, then we resort to enumerating.
Chimpanzees usually start at six.
Test your subtizing skills against a chimp to fail like I did. We have a lot to learn from the other non-human great apes, let’s hope we don’t kill them all.
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