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A visual sense of number

David Burr¹ & John Ross²

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1. Dipartimento di Psicologia, Universita' di Firenze, Italy
2. School of Psychology, The University of Western Australia

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Document Type:

Manuscript

Date:

Received 20 November 2007 08:56 UTC; Posted 20 November 2007

Subjects:

Neuroscience

Tags:

• Vision
• perception
• numerosity
• adaptation

Abstract:

Evidence exists for a non-verbal capacity to apprehend number, in humans¹ (including infants^2,3) and in other primates^4-6. Here we show that perceived numerosity is susceptible to adaptation, along with primary visual properties of a scene like colour, contrast, size and speed. Apparent numerosity was decreased by adapting to large numbers of dots and increased by adapting to small numbers, the effect depended entirely on the numerosity of the adapter, not on contrast, size, orientation or pixel density, and occurred with very low adapter contrasts. We suggest that numerosity is also an independent primary visual property, not reducible to others like spatial frequency or density of texture⁷.

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1 comment

Jonathan Winawer on 17 April 2008 18:28 UTC

great paper. simple and elegant. i recently saw the demo in current biology and it’s a very powerful effect.

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License:

This document is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

How to cite this document:

Burr, David and Ross, John. A visual sense of number. Available from Nature Precedings <http://hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2007.1353.1> (2007)

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Other versions of this document in Nature Precedings

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Other versions of this document elsewhere on the web

• 10.1016/j.cub.2008.02.052 (Peer Reviewed): Published in Current Biology. 2008 Mar 25;18(6):425-8. Epub 2008 Mar 13.

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