Topic
Subitizing
About: Subitizing is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 356 publications have been published within this topic receiving 20455 citations.
Papers published on a yearly basis
Papers
TL;DR: The horizontal segment of the intraparietal sulcus appears as a plausible candidate for domain specificity: It is systematically activated whenever numbers are manipulated, independently of number notation, and with increasing activation as the task puts greater emphasis on quantity processing.
Abstract: Did evolution endow the human brain with a predisposition to represent and acquire knowledge about numbers? Although the parietal lobe has been suggested as a potential substrate for a domain-specific representation of quantities, it is also engaged in verbal, spatial, and attentional functions that may contribute to calculation. To clarify the organisation of number-related processes in the parietal lobe, we examine the three-dimensional intersection of fMRI activations during various numerical tasks, and also review the corresponding neuropsychological evidence. On this basis, we propose a tentative tripartite organisation. The horizontal segment of the intraparietal sulcus (HIPS) appears as a plausible candidate for domain specificity: It is systematically activated whenever numbers are manipulated, independently of number notation, and with increasing activation as the task puts greater emphasis on quantity processing. Depending on task demands, we speculate that this core quantity system, analogous t...
2,580 citations
TL;DR: This paper provides a tutorial introduction to numerical cognition, with a review of essential findings and current points of debate, and proposes a triple-code model, which assumes that numbers are mentally manipulated in an arabic, verbal or analogical magnitude code depending on the requested mental operation.
1,971 citations
TL;DR: 5-month-old infants can calculate the results of simple arithmetical operations on small numbers of items, which indicates that infants possess true numerical concepts, and suggests that humans are innately endowed with arathmetical abilities.
Abstract: Human infants can discriminate between different small numbers of items, and can determine numerical equivalence across perceptual modalities. This may indicate the possession of true numerical concepts. Alternatively, purely perceptual discriminations may underlie these abilities. This debate addresses the nature of subitization, the ability to quantify small numbers of items without conscious counting. Subitization may involve the holistic recognition of canonical perceptual patterns that do not reveal ordinal relationships between the numbers, or may instead be an iterative or 'counting' process that specifies these numerical relationships. Here I show that 5-month-old infants can calculate the results of simple arithmetical operations on small numbers of items. This indicates that infants possess true numerical concepts, and suggests that humans are innately endowed with arithmetical abilities. It also suggests that subitization is a process that encodes ordinal information, not a pattern-recognition process yielding non-numerical percepts.
1,705 citations
TL;DR: The preverbal system of counting and arithmetic reasoning revealed by experiments on numerical representations in animals is described and a model of the fact retrieval process accounts for the salient features of the reaction time differences and error patterns revealed by experiment on mental arithmetic.
1,351 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that subitizing exploits a limited capacity parallel mechanism for item individuation, the FINST mechanism, associated with the multiple target tracking task, and that the position of the attentional focus, as manipulated by cue validity, has a greater effect on counting.
Abstract: "Subitizing," the process of enumeration when there are fewer than 4 items, is rapid (40-100 ms/item), effortless, and accurate. "Counting," the process of enumeration when there are more than 4 items, is slow (250-350 ms/item), effortful, and error-prone. Why is there a difference in the way the small and large numbers of items are enumerated? A theory of enumeration is proposed that emerges from a general theory of vision, yet explains the numeric abilities of preverbal infants, children, and adults. We argue that subitizing exploits a limited-capacity parallel mechanism for item individuation, the FINST mechanism, associated with the multiple target tracking task (Pylyshyn, 1989; Pylyshyn & Storm, 1988). Two kinds of evidence support the claim that subitizing relies on preattentive information, whereas counting requires spatial attention. First, whenever spatial attention is needed to compute a spatial relation (cf. Ullman, 1984) or to perform feature integration (cf. Treisman & Gelade, 1980), subitizing does not occur (Trick & Pylyshyn, 1993a). Second, the position of the attentional focus, as manipulated by cue validity, has a greater effect on counting than subitizing latencies (Trick & Pylyshyn, 1993b).
987 citations
Related Topics (5)
Performance Metrics
| Year | Papers |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 15 |
| 2020 | 21 |
| 2019 | 18 |
| 2018 | 27 |
| 2017 | 13 |
| 2016 | 19 |