{"id":174062,"date":"2023-10-12T20:24:29","date_gmt":"2023-10-13T01:24:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/your-brain-finds-it-easy-to-size-up-four-objects-but-not-five-heres-why"},"modified":"2023-10-12T20:24:29","modified_gmt":"2023-10-13T01:24:29","slug":"your-brain-finds-it-easy-to-size-up-four-objects-but-not-five-heres-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/your-brain-finds-it-easy-to-size-up-four-objects-but-not-five-heres-why","title":{"rendered":"Your Brain Finds It Easy to Size Up Four Objects But Not Five\u2014Here\u2019s Why"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

For more than a century, researchers have known that people are generally very good at eyeballing quantities of four or fewer items. But performance at sizing up numbers drops markedly \u2014 becoming slower and more prone to error \u2014 in the face of larger numbers.<\/p>\n

Now scientists have discovered why: the human brain<\/a> uses one mechanism to assess four or fewer items and a different one for when there are five or more. The findings, obtained by recording the neuron activity<\/a> of 17 human participants, settle a long-standing debate on how the brain estimates how many objects a person sees. The results were published in Nature Human Behaviour<\/em> on 2 October.<\/p>\n

The finding is relevant to the understanding of the nature of thinking<\/a>, says psychologist Lisa Feigenson, the co-director of the Johns Hopkins University Laboratory for Child Development in Baltimore, Maryland. \u201cFundamentally, the question is one of mental architecture: what are the building blocks that give rise to human thought?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For more than a century, researchers have known that people are generally very good at eyeballing quantities of four or fewer items. But performance at sizing up numbers drops markedly \u2014 becoming slower and more prone to error \u2014 in the face of larger numbers. Now scientists have discovered why: the human brain uses one [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":692,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/692"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174062\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}