Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Among the many fascinating findings to come out of the numerical cognition literature, subitizing – the ability to quickly, effortlessly, and accurately identify the number of items in small collections – holds a special place. Despite hundreds of studies probing this ability, the identity of the cognitive systems that explain its unique features remains unknown. One prominent account is that of Trick and Pylyshyn (1994), which is based on pre-attentive parallel individuation of visual indexes. Despite this account's promise, a few researchers have questioned its validity, due to experiments showing that attentional load influences enumeration performance, which they interpret as invalidating a pre-attentional model of subitizing. The present discussion paper offers a novel re-interpretation of some studies on the nature of the relation between subitizing and attention to help clear up in which sense subitizing depends on attentive vs. pre-attentive processes, thereby providing a novel defense of Trick and Pylyshyn's influential model.