The psychophysical laws governing the judgment of perceived numbers of objects or events, called the number sense, have been studied in detail. However, the behavioral principles of equally important numerical representations for action are largely unexplored in both humans and animals. We trained two male carrion crows (Corvus corone) to judge numerical values of instruction stimuli from one to five and to flexibly perform a matching number of pecks. Our quantitative analysis of the crows' number production performance shows the same behavioral regularities that have previously been demonstrated for the judgment of sensory numerosity, such as the numerical distance effect, the numerical magnitude effect, and the logarithmical compression of the number line. The presence of these psychophysical phenomena in crows producing number of pecks suggests a unified sensorimotor number representation system underlying the judgment of the number of external stimuli and internally generated actions.

中文翻译：

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乌鸦行为的数值表示遵循韦伯-费希纳定律。

控制对物体或事件的感知数量的判断的心理物理定律（称为数感）已被详细研究。然而，对于人类和动物来说，同样重要的数字表示的行为原理在很大程度上尚未得到探索。我们训练两只雄性食腐乌鸦（Corvus corone）判断指令刺激的数值，从一到五，并灵活地进行匹配数量的啄食。我们对乌鸦的数字产生表现的定量分析显示了与先前在感官数字判断中所证明的相同的行为规律，例如数字距离效应、数字幅度效应和数轴的对数压缩。乌鸦产生啄食次数时出现的这些心理物理现象表明，存在一个统一的感觉运动数字表示系统，该系统是对外部刺激和内部产生的动作数量判断的基础。