How Humans Count: Numerosity and the Parietal Cortex

Piazza, Manuela; Izard, Véronique

doi:10.1177/1073858409333073

Cited by 135 publications

(142 citation statements)

References 70 publications

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“…In the context of the present study, then, we can conjecture that visual and auditory primes were first processed in their corresponding sensory cortices, the congruency between the auditory and the visual digits being subsequently discriminated either through connections to a bimodal area involved in the processing of numeracy (e.g., intraparietal sulcus; see Piazza & Izard, 2009) or through direct communications between the visual and auditory cortices.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 72%

Multisensory Integration in Complete Unawareness: Evidence From Audiovisual Congruency Priming

et al. 2014

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Multisensory integration is thought to require conscious perception. Although previous studies have shown that an invisible stimulus could be integrated with an audible one, none have demonstrated integration of two subliminal stimuli of different modalities. Here, pairs of identical or different audiovisual target letters (the sound /b/ with the written letter “b” or “m,” respectively) were preceded by pairs of masked identical or different audiovisual prime digits (the sound /6/ with the written digit “6” or “8,” respectively). In three experiments, awareness of the audiovisual digit primes was manipulated, such that participants were either unaware of the visual digit, the auditory digit, or both. Priming of the semantic relations between the auditory and visual digits was found in all experiments. Moreover, a further experiment showed that unconscious multisensory integration was not obtained when participants did not undergo prior conscious training of the task. This suggests that following conscious learning, unconscious processing suffices for multisensory integration.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 72%

Multisensory Integration in Complete Unawareness: Evidence From Audiovisual Congruency Priming

et al. 2014

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“…The answer to this age-old and fundamental question of philosophy has increasingly benefited from recent scientific investigation using psychology and neuroscience. The number sense hypothesis (1,2) suggests that a number is "a basic property of the environment" (3) and particularly, because of its remarkable adaptation effect, "a primary visual property" (2), like color, contrast, or orientation (2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8). However, exactly what attribute in the environment is the primary property and determines numbers in the number sense, or more concretely, what is counted in numerosity perception?…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is self-evident that numerosity is invariant to specific features (e.g., orientation, size, shape, and color) of individual items to be counted. In other words, the primitive units to be counted must be invariant with variation in form dimensions and other visual features (2,3,7,(9)(10)(11). Then, the critical question becomes how to define precisely such abstract and invariant attributes.…”

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confidence: 99%

Topology-defined units in numerosity perception

Zhou

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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What is a number? The number sense hypothesis suggests that numerosity is "a primary visual property" like color, contrast, or orientation. However, exactly what attribute of a stimulus is the primary visual property and determines numbers in the number sense? To verify the invariant nature of numerosity perception, we manipulated the numbers of items connected/enclosed in arbitrary and irregular forms while controlling for low-level features (e.g., orientation, color, and size). Subjects performed discrimination, estimation, and equality judgment tasks in a wide range of presentation durations and across small and large numbers. Results consistently show that connecting/ enclosing items led to robust numerosity underestimation, with the extent of underestimation increasing monotonically with the number of connected/enclosed items. In contrast, grouping based on color similarity had no effect on numerosity judgment. We propose that numbers or the primitive units counted in numerosity perception are influenced by topological invariants, such as connectivity and the inside/outside relationship. Beyond the behavioral measures, neural tuning curves to numerosity in the intraparietal sulcus were obtained using functional MRI adaptation, and the tuning curves showed that numbers represented in the intraparietal sulcus were strongly influenced by topology.W hat is a number? The answer to this age-old and fundamental question of philosophy has increasingly benefited from recent scientific investigation using psychology and neuroscience. The number sense hypothesis (1, 2) suggests that a number is "a basic property of the environment" (3) and particularly, because of its remarkable adaptation effect, "a primary visual property" (2), like color, contrast, or orientation (2-8). However, exactly what attribute in the environment is the primary property and determines numbers in the number sense, or more concretely, what is counted in numerosity perception? Consider the invariant nature of numerosity perception. It is self-evident that numerosity is invariant to specific features (e.g., orientation, size, shape, and color) of individual items to be counted. In other words, the primitive units to be counted must be invariant with variation in form dimensions and other visual features (2, 3, 7, 9-11). Then, the critical question becomes how to define precisely such abstract and invariant attributes. ResultsGeneralizing Connection to a Topological Invariant: Connectivity. We designed arbitrary and irregular shapes of connecting line segments (Fig. 1A, Upper) to test the invariant effect of connection on numerosity judgement independent of the concrete forms or manners of connection (12, 13). Three conditions of connection were constructed: zero, one, and two connected pairs of dots in the test patterns (Fig. 1A). A typical numerosity discrimination task was adopted, in which two visual patterns of dots were briefly presented on opposite sides of fixation (one serving as a reference and the other one serving as a test), and subj...

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“…Sampling from the Mental Number Line 4 & Changeux, 1993;Gallistel & Gelman, 2000;Piazza & Izard, 2009;Verguts & Fias, 2004). …”

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confidence: 99%

Sampling from the mental number line: How are approximate number system representations formed?

Inglis

Gilmore

2013

Cognition

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Sampling from the Mental Number Line 2 AbstractNonsymbolic comparison tasks are commonly used to index the acuity of an individual's approximate number system (ANS), a cognitive mechanism believed to be involved in the development of number skills. Here we asked whether the time that an individual spends observing numerical stimuli influences the precision of the resultant ANS representations.Contrary to standard computational models of the ANS, we found that the longer the stimulus was displayed, the more precise was the resultant representation. We propose an adaptation of the standard model, and suggest that this finding has significant methodological implications for numerical cognition research.

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How Humans Count: Numerosity and the Parietal Cortex

Cited by 135 publications

References 70 publications

Multisensory Integration in Complete Unawareness: Evidence From Audiovisual Congruency Priming

Multisensory Integration in Complete Unawareness: Evidence From Audiovisual Congruency Priming

Topology-defined units in numerosity perception

Sampling from the mental number line: How are approximate number system representations formed?

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