subsizing是指人们能够准确,毫不费力地列举少量项目,大约有四个元素的容量。先前的研究表明,“规范”组织,比如骰子上熟悉的布局,可以很容易地提高人们的亚硝化表现。然而,世界上几乎所有的规范形状也是高度对称的;因此,目前还不清楚以前报道的规范组织的促进作用是否真的是由于规范,或者简单地由空间对称性驱动。这里,我们通过使用对称,然而非规范,形状结构。将这些对称布局与高度受控的随机图案进行比较(实验1),以及完全随机和规范模式(实验2)。我们的结果表明,对称性有助于降低性能,但仅在设定大小为6时,表明效果不足以改善较低或较高范围的人的表现。这也是真的,虽然较弱,在反应时间(RT),误差距离度量,韦伯分数。另一方面,规范布局在多个集合大小上产生了更快,更准确的subitizing性能。我们的结论是,尽管先前的发现在其规范形状中混合了对称性,他们关于形状规范的发现不能仅仅用对称性来解释。我们还建议我们的对称和规范的结果最好用“成群”和模式识别帐户来解释,分别。
Subitizing refers to ability of people to accurately and effortlessly enumerate a small number of items, with a capacity around four elements. Previous research showed that \"canonical\" organizations, such as familiar layouts on a dice, can readily improve subitizing performance of people. However, almost all canonical shapes found in the world are also highly symmetrical; therefore, it is unclear whether previously reported facilitative effect of canonical organization is really due to canonicality, or simply driven by spatial symmetry. Here, we investigated the possible effect of symmetry on subitizing by using symmetrical, yet non-canonical, shape structures. These symmetrical layouts were compared with highly controlled random patterns (Experiment 1), as well as fully random and canonical patterns (Experiment 2). Our results showed that symmetry facilitates subitizing performance, but only at set size of 6, suggesting that the effect is insufficient to improve performance of people in the lower or upper range. This was also true, although weaker, in reaction time (RT), error distance measures, and Weber Fractions. On the other hand, canonical layouts produced faster and more accurate subitizing performances across multiple set sizes. We conclude that, although previous findings mixed symmetry in their canonical shapes, their findings on shape canonicality cannot be explained by symmetry alone. We also propose that our symmetrical and canonical results are best explained by the \"groupitizing\" and pattern recognition accounts, respectively.