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posted by janrinok on Monday October 12 2015, @10:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the er-1-2-3,-er-5 dept.

But what, exactly, is a number? A group of Chinese researchers tackled this deep philosophical question from a neurological perspective in a study reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They sought to verify the invariant nature of numerosity perception in an experiment that included fMRI scanning to establish the brain structures activated in number sense.

Proceeding from the obvious assumption that numerosity is invariant to specific features like size, orientation, shape and color, they designed a test that included a number of dots within an enclosed space. To test the invariant effect of connection, they used arbitrary and irregular line segments connecting dots; there were three conditions: zero, one, and two connected pairs of dots were included in the test patterns. Subjects were shown these patterns adjacent to reference patterns that contained 12 dots unconnected by line segments. They were asked to indicate solely through visual perception which pattern contained more dots.

The researchers found that connecting dots in the patterns led to a robust result of underestimation. The researchers tested another topological invariant, the inside/outside relationship, by enclosing pairs of dots within ovals and irregular oval-like shapes. Interestingly, the results demonstrated that underestimation also occurred in this condition, and that it depended directly on the number of enclosed dot pairs in the pattern.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by sjwt on Monday October 12 2015, @11:07AM

    by sjwt (2826) on Monday October 12 2015, @11:07AM (#248356)

    Seriously,

    I worked in a warehouse for 8 years,
    in the pick and pack section the highest leveled job was order checker.

    We were still using good old paper pick, so out throughput was high, but errors were also up, with a target rate of 99.8% and we often sat just on 99.8X%, sometimes lower, but mostly made it.

    After a year or two of picking if you were good and got to move around though all the sections you could start to check the orders as they came around,
    and I kid you not, after a month or so of checking orders, you could reach into a box that ranged between the size of A5 to A2(5x8inch to 16x23inch) that was full of mixed stationary goods, and in a few seconds check off every item and quantity.

    I could look at a list of 20 different items and amounts, glance into the box and know it was short one of 8 blue pens,and taht there was a green stapler instead of a blue one, it's fucking scary when that clicks, your brain can look at a list of that much and into a poorly organized box and in 2-3 seconds check it all off, this went even further, you could know that a wrong item say a pencil case instead of a folder was because the person had picked one shelf too high or low, or an aisle over.

    We truly don't use the power of our brains in day to day often.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Monday October 12 2015, @11:30AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday October 12 2015, @11:30AM (#248362) Homepage
    "Proceeding from the obvious assumption that numerosity is invariant to specific features like size, orientation, shape and color"

    Why is guestimating the number of tennis balls in a tray presumed to be no different from - in particular, no simpler than - guestimating the same number grains of sand in that tray? That really isn't obvious.

    If "Number sense hypothesis holds that the intuitive understanding of numbers is a primary visual property, like color sense or physical orientation."
    How do I "see" skewes number? I intuitively understand the number, I can give you a number half as large, and twice as large, at an instant. Yet there's nothing visual going on all. Almost every number I've ever encountered, I've never seen.

    These guys are juggling ill-defined concepts. I predict they're finding exactly the conclusions that they expected to find too. With a significant P value to boot.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 12 2015, @12:11PM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 12 2015, @12:11PM (#248370) Journal

      I arrived at similar conclusions.

      The whole thing does make me wonder how brains work with numbers, though. As a kid, I progressed rapidly, ahead of my peers. As a high schooler and in college, I found that I ran into brick walls when I tried to advance in math. Some of that shit is just over my head, and I never found a way to make sense of them.

      My youngest kid, however, has no problem with those brick walls. He's doing stuff way over my head. When I attempt to understand what he's doing, the talk quickly takes off through one of those brick walls, like he has a magic door through the wall, and I just can't find the door knob/handle.

      I guess he has a couple wrinkles in his gray matter that I don't - or I have the wrinkles, and he doesn't. Or the wrinkles just connect in a different fashion. From where I stand, it looks like he has the potential to do original work with math. That would be pretty cool - "My kid developed blah blah blah." To which most people would respond, "WTF you talking about?"

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @06:24PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @06:24PM (#248545)

        it may just be that you were not motivated enough at the right time. a lot of smart people become lazy and assume that actually doing homework is useless, and then when things get a little more complicated, they fail to keep up.
        in any case, congratulations on the smart kid. mine has a few years left before I expect him to read or write, so I can't tell whether he'll be as lazy as I was.

    • (Score: 2) by buswolley on Monday October 12 2015, @04:05PM

      by buswolley (848) on Monday October 12 2015, @04:05PM (#248462)

      There are a few problems with the summary, namely that the summary fails to even reference previous work in this area, which is quite substantial...at least behaviorally.
      There are a number of subfields of number sense, but I'll just bring up one straightforward past research question. Suppose I were to show briefly show you 10 acorns spread loosely on the ground over a square foot, or briefly show you 10 acorns in a 6 square inch pile. Will we perceive those piles to have equivalent number of acorns? Or say I show you 20 small acorns, packed tightly, or 10 xtra large acorns, packed tightly, such that either pile takes up the same area. Will you reliably perceive theme as different in frequency? How about one pile of 10 acorns and one pile of 11 acorns for less than a second. Will you perceive that one pile is larger, or will it take 12 or 13 or 14 acorns in the larger pile before we notice a difference in magnitude. Does our accuracy change and strategies change as the number of items increase? I might do something different when estimating whether there are more eggs in a basket than when estimating whether one pile of sand contains more sand than another....probably because in the former we perceive it as a collection of individual objects (i.e. how many), while in the latter we probably perceive it as a unitized object (i.e. how much).

      These kinds of questions are not based on ill-defined concepts, if you think in terms of skill.

      --
      subicular junctures
  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @11:39AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @11:39AM (#248363)

    Finally the Dictator In Chief will be able to determine how many Executive Orders he can issue before the people notice that he is illegally ignoring Congress and ruling by decree. All glory to Greatest American Emperor Omaba.