Approximate Arithmetic Processing On Multiple Visual Ensembles
Our visual working memory system has limited capacity for representing a handful of objects at once. One strategy to cope with this limit is representing sets of objects as ensembles. The Approximate Number System (ANS) enables humans to enumerate multiple sets of objects approximately using ensemble representations. However, research has yet not explore how ensemble representations stored in visual working memory might be arithmetically manipulated.
Thus, the goal of the current study is to examine whether human adults can approximately divide a subset of items from heterogeneous visual arrays and whether this capacity varies with the number of subsets presented. Another goal of this study is to determine the upper limit of the number of subsets adults can enumerate and arithmetically compute. This study will help us better understand the computational efficiency of ensemble representations to support higher-level numerical computational abilities.
Comments
Beautiful work Echo & Gordon…
Beautiful work Echo & Gordon! If you had to guess what types of cognitive or perceptual skills do you think might correlate with performance in this task? 50% of our participants showed a significant difference between probe before and probe after when there were only 2 colors. This means they really only represented the superset with above chance accuracy. But the other 50% showed no difference between probe before and probe after when there were 2 or more colors (38, 8, +3%). What factors do you think might differentiate these 50% of participants who can simultaneously hold multiple approximate number representations in mind and also computer over them? Liz Brannon
Thank you, Dr Brannon! This…
Thank you, Dr Brannon! This task is a difficult task, and different types of cognitive skills are involved. Visual perception definitely plays a role in this experiment, and I think phonological loop might also get involved when participants see number of thieves and trying to retain this number in their short term memory. Some participants mentioned that they selectively attend to one color subset and hoped they guessed the right color. In this case, selective attention is also involved.
Several factors can affect participants' performance. First, many participants applied strategies like selective attention or only look at a small proportion of the display. These strategies might improve overall performance. However, I think the factor that differentiate their performance would be parallel enumeration capacity （also mentioned in Halberda's study). Our experiment suggested 50% of people can only enumerate and divide a superset. It might indicate that arithmetic processing and parallel enumeration share same cognitive pathway, and arithmetic computation overloaded its processing capacity.
Thank you, Dr Brannon! This…
Thank you, Dr Brannon! This task is a difficult task, and different types of cognitive skills are involved. Visual perception definitely plays a role in this experiment, and I think phonological loop might also get involved when participants see number of thieves and trying to retain this number in their short term memory. Some participants mentioned that they selectively attend to one color subset and hoped they guessed the right color. In this case, selective attention is also involved.
Several factors can affect participants' performance. First, many participants applied strategies like selective attention or only look at a small proportion of the display. These strategies might improve overall performance. However, I think the factor that differentiate their performance would be parallel enumeration capacity （also mentioned in Halberda's study). Our experiment suggested 50% of people can only enumerate and divide a superset. It might indicate that arithmetic processing and parallel enumeration share same cognitive pathway, and arithmetic computation overloaded its processing capacity.