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Creating Objects and Object Categories for Studying Perception and Perceptual Learning
Published on: November 2, 2012
The process of object individuation shared across visual and tactile modalities
1School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, China.
Cognitive Psychology
|August 4, 2026
Summary
Object individuation (OI) for counting small numbers (subitizing) relies on shared resources across touch and vision. Working memory load in one sense impacts counting in the other, showing a common location-based process.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Sensory Perception
Background:
- Object individuation (OI) is crucial for environmental interaction, relying on spatial information.
- The relationship between OI, numerosity representation, and sensory modalities (vision, touch) is debated.
- It's unclear if enumeration uses modality-specific or shared cognitive resources.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if tactile and visual object individuation (OI) share cognitive resources.
- To determine if working memory (WM) load affects cross-modal enumeration (subitizing).
Main Methods:
- A cross-modal enumeration and working memory (WM) dual-task paradigm was used.
- Experiment 1: Tactile WM task with visual enumeration.
- Experiment 2: Visual WM task with tactile enumeration.
Main Results:
- Task-irrelevant WM load significantly modulated subitizing performance in the target modality.
- High WM load increased errors and reduced subitizing capacity compared to low load.
- Modulation was specific to the subitizing range, not a general dual-task cost.
Conclusions:
- Visual and tactile working memory and subitizing share a common object individuation (OI) process.
- This shared process operates on location, independent of sensory modality.
- Findings align with neuroimaging showing modality-shared frontoparietal regions in enumeration and WM.
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