| Posted: 14 February 2016 at 2:50pm | IP Logged | 2
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Most people can't visualize more than 7 object in their mind's eye at a time---------------------------------- I think people viewing more than 7 items at once have trouble identifying quickly how many they are seeing in the same way as they might if they saw 2 or 3, but clearly most people should be able to visualise a dice roll showing two sixes, i.e. 12 dots.
That said, the human mind is not constructed to deal precisely with anything beyond small numbers. If we look at a field of sheep, normal people cannot tell the difference between 25 sheep and 27 sheep, for example, without actually going through and counting them out laboriously (though it should be noted, there are savants that have been able to instantly count large numbers from a quick glance).
There is a tendency, for us to make a cognitive short cut if we see anything more than about 7 and label it 'lots'. This leads to cognitive biases such as recency bias -- where if given a long list of data, we allot an irrational amount of weight to the most recent 5 - 7 pieces of data.
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