Event-Related Potential Indicators of Working Memory Activity During Subitizing

Abstract

Subitizing has been generally defined as the capacity limited process involved in swiftly, accurately, and effortlessly apprehending the numerosity of small collections of perhaps three or four items. Competing explanations have appealed to perceptual, configural, or WM processing mechanisms to explain subitizing. Over five experiments this thesis used event-related potential data to investigate whether working memory (WM) activity is involved in subitizing response contingent item arrays, and the related question of whether subitizing limits might be determined by some capacity constraints in WM.