Evidence map›Paper›PMID 33523851›Full record

ArticleScience advances2021

Visual number sense in untrained deep neural networks.

Gwangsu Kim, Jaeson Jang, Seungdae Baek, Min Song, Se-Bum Paik

Open access · goldAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Science advances, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
29citing papers in PubMed
14.9field-weighted citation impact, top 1% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

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.

2 · The registry

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.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

29 citing papers in PubMed, 74 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Article
  2. Neural Tuning for Ordinal Processing: Convergent Patterns in Human Brains and Artificial Networks.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026
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  7. Symbolic numerical generalization through representational alignment.CogSci ... Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society (U.S.). Conference · 2025
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4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.

Gwangsu KimDepartment of Physics, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon 34141, Republic of Korea.ORCID 0000-0003-2299-0140
Jaeson JangDepartment of Bio and Brain Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon 34141, Republic of Korea.ORCID 0000-0002-1142-5659
Seungdae BaekDepartment of Bio and Brain Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon 34141, Republic of Korea.ORCID 0000-0003-4516-6293
Min SongDepartment of Bio and Brain Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon 34141, Republic of Korea.ORCID 0000-0002-9485-2321
Se-Bum PaikDepartment of Bio and Brain Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon 34141, Republic of Korea. sbpaik@kaist.ac.kr.ORCID 0000-0002-4078-305X
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology · KR

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Number sense, the ability to estimate numerosity, is observed in naïve animals, but how this cognitive function emerges in the brain remains unclear. Here, using an artificial deep neural network that models the ventral visual stream of the brain, we show that number-selective neurons can arise spontaneously, even in the complete absence of learning. We also show that the responses of these neurons can induce the abstract number sense, the ability to discriminate numerosity independent of low-level visual cues. We found number tuning in a randomly initialized network originating from a combination of monotonically decreasing and increasing neuronal activities, which emerges spontaneously from the statistical properties of bottom-up projections. We confirmed that the responses of these number-selective neurons show the single- and multineuron characteristics observed in the brain and enable the network to perform number comparison tasks. These findings provide insight into the origin of innate cognitive functions.

Identifiers

PMID33523851
PMCPMC7775775
OpenAlexW3118848875

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY-NC
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

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.