ArticleeLife2022
A visual sense of number emerges from divisive normalization in a simple center-surround convolutional network.
Article in eLife, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 18 citations in OpenAlex.
- Quantity Estimation by Repeated Comparative Judgments.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Texture density discrimination is more precise than number discrimination.Journal of vision · 2026Article
- Brain Representation of Numerosity across the Senses and Presentation Formats.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Numerosity adaptation suppresses early visual responses.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Hierarchical representations of relative numerical magnitudes in the human frontoparietal cortex.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Emergence of number sense through the integration of multimodal information: developmental learning insights from neural network models.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Many species of animals exhibit an intuitive sense of number, suggesting a fundamental neural mechanism for representing numerosity in a visual scene. Recent empirical studies demonstrate that early feedforward visual responses are sensitive to numerosity of a dot array but substantially less so to continuous dimensions orthogonal to numerosity, such as size and spacing of the dots. However, the mechanisms that extract numerosity are unknown. Here, we identified the core neurocomputational principles underlying these effects: (1) center-surround contrast filters; (2) at different spatial scales; with (3) divisive normalization across network units. In an untrained computational model, these principles eliminated sensitivity to size and spacing, making numerosity the main determinant of the neuronal response magnitude. Moreover, a model implementation of these principles explained both well-known and relatively novel illusions of numerosity perception across space and time. This supports the conclusion that the neural structures and feedforward processes that encode numerosity naturally produce visual illusions of numerosity. Taken together, these results identify a set of neurocomputational properties that gives rise to the ubiquity of the number sense in the animal kingdom.
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Registered trials
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