Relevant: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subitizing" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subitizing</a><p>Also, technically it's not that we perceive small number "better". We only <i>perceive</i> (i.e. subitize) the size of a small collection. We find out the size of a large collection by counting, but counting is not a kind of perception, any more than inference, computation, etc are kinds of perception.
I find this unconvincing. FTA:<p><i>“More than 150 years ago, the economist and philosopher William Stanley Jevons discovered something curious about the number 4. While musing about how the mind conceives of numbers, he tossed a handful of black beans into a cardboard box. Then, after a fleeting glance, he guessed how many there were, before counting them to record the true value. After more than 1,000 trials, he saw a clear pattern. When there were four or fewer beans in the box, he always guessed the right number. But for five beans or more, his quick estimations were often incorrect.”</i><p>and<p><i>“For example, some neurons are tuned to the number 3. When they’re presented with three objects, they fire more. Other neurons are tuned to the number 5 and fire when presented with five objects, and so on. These neurons aren’t exclusively committed to their favorites: They also fire for numbers adjacent to it. (So the neuron tuned to 5 also fires for four and six objects.) But they don’t do it as often, and as the presented number gets farther away from the preferred number, the neurons’ firing rate decreases”</i><p>So, the experiment was about integers, not numbers in general, and the neurons don’t necessarily encode integers, but also could encode reals with noise/uncertainty.<p>I think the latter decently describes the experimental data if the noise/uncertainty is around 20% of the value. Rounding such a signal to integers will be faultless for n < 4, and get increasingly worse the larger <i>n</i> is.<p>In pseudocode:<p><pre><code> Round(n * (1 + gaussianRandom())) == n
</code></pre>
for small <i>n</i>, but not for larger <i>n</i>.<p>To support a claim that we’re better at smaller integers, I think you’d have to show that the standard deviation for larger <i>n</i> goes up superlinearly.<p>(An alternative way to phrase this is by claiming that these cells encode logarithms of numbers)
The rule of four comes in handy across all kinds of places. A command line argument that can be run with 4 or fewer distinct words/flags/etc is one I'm much more likely to try running than one with more.
I didn't read the article but, small numbers are more immediately useful. Larger numbers are needed for describing more complex phenomena, and their construction relies on smaller numbers. So I find the explanation to the title of this article to be intuitively obvious; I don't see how it could be possible for a brain to evolve to perceive large numbers better than smaller ones
What's the number of things that we can count instataneously and intuitively. What's your number in your opinion?<p>It would appear as though it's three or four. I look over to some series of things, if it's exactly two or three, I know that pattern, if it's more, I have to make out groupings of two or three. I think even for four or five we might do this habitually?
These guys claim to see distinct “neural signatures” depending on whether n is >4 or =<4. They can see neurons misfiring for the larger numbers.<p>Is it hard-coded in our brains? My guess is no. You can probably train brains to instantly recognise patterns for numbers larger than 4, and I’d expect the observed effect would disappear for then trained individuals.
I'd love if these guys spoke to the Allen institute guys doing genetics of individual neurons; what is it that makes these neurons count particular values.
Also, does anyone understand what the 'interface' is? Is this 'n' spikes within a given time, or spikes on different inputs?
The headline would be fuel for anti-metric advocates.<p>"Look! 1 pound is easier to mentally process than 454 grams."<p>"3 cups is better than 710 mL."