Michael Vassar:
I’m also bothered by the idea that our ancestors even had a concept of “3 years from now” distinct from “5 years from now”.
Humans (as well as animals) do seem to have an instinctive, analog system for comprehending magnitude, one which the formal system of numbers builds on. (See e.g. Brannon 2006 for one overview.) Weber’s law seems to be a consequence of the way the analog system represents numbers. I haven’t looked at the data, but I wonder how the correlation works out once you take into account the inaccuracies introduced by Weber’s law. Of course, even hunter-gatherers probably had rough concepts of age categories that didn’t necessarily require exact representation of age.
(For those not in the know—shamelessly copying straight from the linked paper here, being too lazy to write it up in my own words—Weber’s law states that the change in stimulus intensity needed for an organism to detect a change is a constant proportion of the original stimulus intensity rather than a constant amount. For example, if an increment of 2 pounds is needed to detect a change in a 10 pound weight, then an increment of 4 pounds would be needed to detect a change in a 20 pound weight.)
Michael Vassar: I’m also bothered by the idea that our ancestors even had a concept of “3 years from now” distinct from “5 years from now”.
Humans (as well as animals) do seem to have an instinctive, analog system for comprehending magnitude, one which the formal system of numbers builds on. (See e.g. Brannon 2006 for one overview.) Weber’s law seems to be a consequence of the way the analog system represents numbers. I haven’t looked at the data, but I wonder how the correlation works out once you take into account the inaccuracies introduced by Weber’s law. Of course, even hunter-gatherers probably had rough concepts of age categories that didn’t necessarily require exact representation of age.
(For those not in the know—shamelessly copying straight from the linked paper here, being too lazy to write it up in my own words—Weber’s law states that the change in stimulus intensity needed for an organism to detect a change is a constant proportion of the original stimulus intensity rather than a constant amount. For example, if an increment of 2 pounds is needed to detect a change in a 10 pound weight, then an increment of 4 pounds would be needed to detect a change in a 20 pound weight.)