The magical number four: A biological, historical and mythological enigma

Abstract

Precise recognition of small object numbers without counting is a widespread phenomenon. It is well documented for humans and for a series of non-human vertebrates. Recently this has been confirmed for an invertebrate, the honeybee.¹ This type of inborn numerical competence has been named “subitizing”, from the Latin subito = suddenly, immediately. It differs from the classical, sequential counting which has to be trained, starting with the help of our fingers. For humans it had been established since 1871 by Jevons² that only up to four objects are precisely recognized and memorized. Under conditions which do not allow sequential counting, mistakes start to occur in case of more than four objects. This result has been confirmed whenever the range of visual attention has been carefully tested under a variety of rigorous conditions. It provides the basis for a novel hypothesis about the evolution of counting and numbering systems in ancient civilizations.³  

Keywords: :

• honeybee
• magical number four
• numerical competence
• subitizing

Acknowledgments

I thank my colleagues Profs. H. Beier, H. Hoehn and J. Tautz for critical reading of this manuscript and Dr. Mario Pahl for helpful suggestions.