Trial reportPsychonomic bulletin & review2014
Enumeration of small collections violates Weber's law.
Trial report in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Design guidelines for animated data visualization based on perceptual capacity limits.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2026Review
- Delayed First Language Exposure Negatively Impacts Representation of Small Quantities: Evidence from Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Visual continuum in non-human animals: serial dependence revealed in dogs.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Finding the subitizing in groupitizing: Evidence for parallel subitizing of dots and groups in grouped arrays.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Article
- Symbol grounding of number words in the subitization range.Psychological research · 2021Article
- Groupitizing Improves Estimation of Numerosity of Auditory Sequences.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Article
- Electrophysiological Signatures of Numerosity Encoding in a Delayed Match-to-Sample Task.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Article
- A unified account of numerosity perception.Nature human behaviour · 2020Article
- Higher attentional costs for numerosity estimation at high densities.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2019Article
- Capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) treat small and large numbers of items similarly during a relative quantity judgment task.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2016Article
- Development of brain systems for nonsymbolic numerosity and the relationship to formal math academic achievement.Human brain mapping · 2015Article
- Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In a phenomenon called subitizing, we can immediately generate exact counts of small collections (one to three objects), in contrast to larger collections, for which we must either create rough estimates or serially count. A parsimonious explanation for this advantage for small collections is that noisy representations of small collections are more tolerable, due to the larger relative differences between consecutive numbers (e.g., 2 vs. 3 is a 50 % increase, but 10 vs. 11 is only a 10 % increase). In contrast, the advantage could stem from the fact that small-collection enumeration is more precise, relying on a unique mechanism. Here, we present two experiments that conclusively showed that the enumeration of small collections is indeed "superprecise." Participants compared numerosity within either small or large visual collections in conditions in which the relative differences were controlled (e.g., performance for 2 vs. 3 was compared with performance for 20 vs. 30). Small-number comparison was still faster and more accurate, across both "more-fewer" judgments (Exp. 1), and "same-different" judgments (Exp. 2). We then reviewed the remaining potential mechanisms that might underlie this superprecision for small collections, including the greater diagnostic value of visual features that correlate with number and a limited capacity for visually individuating objects.
Indexed as
Identifiers
23824632What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.