ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
The neural signature of numerosity by separating numerical and continuous magnitude extraction in visual cortex with frequency-tagged EEG.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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28 citing papers in PubMed, 74 citations in OpenAlex.
- An Underestimation Bias in the Numerical Perception of Rewarding Stimuli: An ERP Study.Journal of Intelligence · 2026Article
- Perceptual grouping, not covert attention, drives the connectedness effect in the ANS.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Early neurophysiological signatures of multi-digit number length encoding.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Segmentation as a bottleneck in numerical cognition.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Frequency-tagging EEG reveals spontaneous categorical discrimination of visual self-identity.iScience · 2025Article
- Identifying conceptual neural responses to symbolic numerals.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- The Interaction between Congruency and Numerical Ratio Effects in the Nonsymbolic Comparison Test.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Bayesian analysis of phase data in EEG and MEG.eLife · 2023Article
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- The Sound of Emotion: Pinpointing Emotional Voice Processing Via Frequency Tagging EEG.Brain sciences · 2023Article
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- A shared numerical magnitude representation evidenced by the distance effect in frequency-tagging EEG.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Deprivation of Auditory Experience Influences Numerosity Discrimination, but Not Numerosity Estimation.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- Bidirectional relationship between visual perception and mathematics performance in Chinese kindergartners.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2022Article
- Non-symbolic numerosity encoding escapes spatial frequency equalization.Psychological research · 2021Article
- Automatic integration of numerical formats examined with frequency-tagged EEG.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Temporal enhancement of cross-adaptation between density and size perception based on the theory of magnitude.Journal of vision · 2021Article
- Processing of numerical representation of fingers depends on their location in space.Psychological research · 2021Article
- Distinct neural sources underlying visual word form processing as revealed by steady state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP).Scientific reports · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 4 countries.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ability to handle approximate quantities, or number sense, has been recurrently linked to mathematical skills, although the nature of the mechanism allowing to extract numerical information (i.e., numerosity) from environmental stimuli is still debated. A set of objects is indeed not only characterized by its numerosity but also by other features, such as the summed area occupied by the elements, which often covary with numerosity. These intrinsic relations between numerosity and nonnumerical magnitudes led some authors to argue that numerosity is not independently processed but extracted through a weighting of continuous magnitudes. This view cannot be properly tested through classic behavioral and neuroimaging approaches due to these intrinsic correlations. The current study used a frequency-tagging EEG approach to separately measure responses to numerosity as well as to continuous magnitudes. We recorded occipital responses to numerosity, total area, and convex hull changes but not to density and dot size. We additionally applied a model predicting primary visual cortex responses to the set of stimuli. The model output was closely aligned with our electrophysiological data, since it predicted discrimination only for numerosity, total area, and convex hull. Our findings thus demonstrate that numerosity can be independently processed at an early stage in the visual cortex, even when completely isolated from other magnitude changes. The similar implicit discrimination for numerosity as for some continuous magnitudes, which correspond to basic visual percepts, shows that both can be extracted independently, hence substantiating the nature of numerosity as a primary feature of the visual scene.
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