Parallel individuation system

Cognitive psychology
Perception
Visual perception Object recognition Face recognition Pattern recognition
Attention
Memory
Aging and memory Emotional memory Learning Long-term memory
Metacognition
Language
Metalanguage
Thinking
Cognition Concept Reasoning Decision making Problem solving
Numerical cognition
Numerosity adaptation effect Approximate number system Parallel individuation system
v t e

The parallel individuation system, also called object tracking system is a non-symbolic cognitive system that supports the representation of numerical values from zero to three (in infants) or four (in adults and non-human animals). It is one of the two cognitive systems responsible for the representation of number, the other one being the approximate number system.^[1] Unlike the approximate number system, which is not precise and provides only an estimation of the number, the parallel individuation system is an exact system and encodes the exact numerical identity of the individual items.^[2] The parallel individuation system has been attested in human adults, non-human animals,^[2] such as fish^[3] and human infants, although performance of infants is dependent on their age and task.^[4]

Evidence

The evidence for parallel individuation system comes from a number of experiments on adults, infants and non-human animals. For example, adults perform error-free when they enumerate elements for numerosities from one to four, after which their error rate rises.^[4] Similarly, infants of 10 to 12 months represented the values for "exactly one", "exactly two" and "exactly three", but not for higher numbers, in a task based on hidden object retrieval.^[4]