Perceptions of numerosity, duration and distance play fundamental roles in our behaviour and in our thinking, but how we perceive these abstract quantities is a mystery. Cheyette and Piantadosi provide a model that explains both new and long-standing experimental results on the accuracy and speed with which human subjects report the numerosity of a visible set.
References
Shannon, C. E. Bell Syst. Tech. J. 27, 623–656 (1948). 379–423.
Thomson, W. (Kelvin) in Popular Lectures and Addresses Vol. 1 p. 73–460 (Macmillan, 1883).
Cheyette, S.J. & Piantadosi, S.T. Nat. Hum. Behav. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-00946-0 (2020).
Gallistel, C. R. Finding numbers in the brain. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci. 373, 20170119 (2017).
Cover, T.M. & Thomas, J.A. Elements of Information Theory 2nd ed. (Wiley Interscience, 1991).
Hayes, B. Am. Sci. 89, 490–494 (2001).
Fairhall, A. L., Lewen, G. D., Bialek, W. & de Ruyter Van Steveninck, R. R. Nature 412, 787–792 (2001).
Gallistel, C.R. & Gelman, R. in Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning (eds K. Holyoak & R. Morrison) 559–588 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005).
Gibbon, J. Psychol. Rev. 84, 279–335 (1977).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The author declares no competing interests.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Gallistel, C.R. Getting Numbers into Brains. Nat Hum Behav 4, 1222–1223 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-00970-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-00970-0
- Springer Nature Limited