Abstract
When observing a simple visual scene such as an array of dots, observers can easily and automatically extract their number. How does our visual system accomplish this? We investigate the role of specific spatial frequencies to the encoding of number through cross-adaptation. In two experiments, observers were peripherally adapted to six randomly generated sinusoidal gratings varying from relatively low-spatial frequency (M = 0.44 c/deg) to relatively high-spatial frequency (M = 5.88 c/deg). Subsequently, observers judged which side of the screen had a higher number of dots. We found a strong number-adaptation effect to low-spatial frequency gratings (i.e., participants significantly underestimated the number of dots on the adapted side) but a significantly reduced adaptation effect for high-spatial frequency gratings. Various control conditions demonstrate that these effects are not due to a generic response bias for the adapted side, nor moderated by dot size or spacing effects. In a third experiment, we observed no cross-adaptation for centrally presented gratings. Our results show that observers’ peripheral number perception can be adapted even with stimuli lacking any numeric or segmented object information and that low spatial frequencies adapt peripheral number perception more than high ones. Together, our results are consistent with recent number perception models that suggest a key role for spatial frequency in the extraction of number from the visual signal (e.g., Paul, Ackooij, Ten Cate, & Harvey, 2022), but additionally suggest that some spatial frequencies – especially in the low range and in the periphery – may be weighted more by the visual system when estimating number. We argue that the cross-adaptation paradigm is also a useful methodology for discovering the primitives of visual number encoding.
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Notes
An anonymous reviewer notes that this finding is especially surprising given that the energy of the gratings is likely to be much higher than that of 160 dots. We leave this as a useful observation for future work.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by an NSERC Discovery Grant to D.O. The authors thank Manish Toofany and Nathan Louie for subject recruitment and data collection. The results of Experiment 1 were presented at the Vision Sciences Society meeting of 2019.
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Bonn, C.D., Odic, D. Effects of spatial frequency cross-adaptation on the visual number sense. Atten Percept Psychophys 86, 248–262 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-023-02798-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-023-02798-y