3 ms·
Is it really four? Could have sworn it was five, since you got a "middle" to help managing the group or subgroup. At least I immediately bunch things in groups
by falsaberN1 3y ago
Is it really four? Could have sworn it was five, since you got a "middle" to help managing the group or subgroup.
At least I immediately bunch things in groups of five, so I always thought it was the correct one.
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoIt's deffo 4 for me. I can see 4 in one shot, if it's say 5 or 6 or a bit higher I have to split the group and subitise each then sum them. YMMV and your mileage beats mine :)
- falsaberN1 3y agoHuh. Interesting. I thought it was one of those things like how we ended up with base 10 numbers because we have 5x2 fingers and that kinda stuff, but interesting to know I was off.
- Modified3019 3y agoI had a warehouse job for a while, essentially being my own independent mini-factory within a larger factory, cutting conduit and packaging things up for shipping out. Part of the job involved accurately counting hundreds or thousand of screws. I quickly found that visually grouping screws into groups of 4 on a large table was the fastest way to be 100% accurate. If I tried to do 5, sometimes I’d get a sort of confusion/uncertainty, not being quite clear if it was really 5, or 4 or 6, forcing me to check. I’d go on to group these little piles of 4, into larger groups of 4. So I got really good at counting in 4 and it’s multiples, 16, 64, 256. I can definitely see 4 being generally optimal, unless one can expect perfect visual ordering, which is possible with text, but rare in the real world.
- pfannkuchen 3y agoIf you are subgrouping isn't this just a heuristic that is so low latency that it feels instantaneous but actually involves a second operation?