Baby Chicks Show Off Smarts

If someone calls you a “birdbrain,” you can now consider it a compliment, since baby chicks display math skills that surpass those of most human newborns. At the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences in Trento, Italy, chicks were raised with five yellow toy balls. The chicks soon became socially attached to the toy balls and would even make distress calls if their “companions” were removed from sight. In a later stage of the study, the chicks had to keep track of the number of balls using addition and subtraction. Their behavior demonstrated that they could spontaneously choose the larger group. Experiments have only tested chicks’ mental prowess up to the number five, but researchers speculate they might be able to handle arithmetic up to ten, which would far exceed human newborns’ ability to cope with only three.