ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2017
Psychophysical evidence for the number sense.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
46 citing papers in PubMed, 109 citations in OpenAlex.
- Adaptation acts directly on the sensory representation of numerosity.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Kicking the mental number line: a kinematic investigation of numerical processing in childhood.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Numerosity estimation in children with ADHD across space, time, vision and action.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- The Social Relevance of Numbers: Insights from Animal Studies.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Extrastriate activity reflects sensorimotor-induced bias in estimating number of visual humans.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Hierarchical representations of relative numerical magnitudes in the human frontoparietal cortex.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Feature-selective adaptation of numerosity perception.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Bistable perception of symbolic numbers.Journal of vision · 2024Article
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- Inter-individual, hemispheric and sex variability of brain activations during numerosity processing.Brain structure & function · 2024Article
- Phenomenology, Quantity, and Numerosity.Journal of Intelligence · 2023Article
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- Omit needless words: Sentence length perception.PloS one · 2023Article
- Autistic individuals show less grouping-induced bias in numerosity judgments.Frontiers in child and adolescent psychiatry · 2023Article
- Numerosity as a visual property: Evidence from two highly evolutionary distant species.Frontiers in physiology · 2023Article
- Symmetry as a grouping cue for numerosity perception.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Grouping-Induced Numerosity Biases Vary with Autistic-Like Personality Traits.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2022Article
- Role of Lateral Inhibition on Visual Number Sense.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2022Article
- Untypical Contrast Normalization Explains the "Weak Outnumber Strong" Numerosity Illusion.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is now clear that most animals, including humans, possess an ability to rapidly estimate number. Some have questioned whether this ability arises from dedicated numerosity mechanisms, or is derived indirectly from judgements of density or other attributes. We describe a series of psychophysical experiments, largely using adaptation techniques, which demonstrate clearly the existence of a number sense in humans. The number sense is truly general, extending over space, time and sensory modality, and is closely linked with action. We further show that when multiple cues are present, numerosity emerges as the natural dimension for discrimination. However, when element density increases past a certain level, the elements become too crowded to parse, and the scene is perceived as a texture rather than array of elements. The two different regimes are psychophysically discriminable in that they follow distinct psychophysical laws, and show different dependencies on eccentricity, luminance levels and effects of perceptual grouping. The distinction is important, as the ability to discriminate numerosity, but not texture, correlates with formal maths skills.This article is part of the discussion meeting issue 'The origins of numerical abilities'.
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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.