Innate numerosity perception and its roots in early vision

Abstract

In the current issue of Cerebral Cortex, Lorenzi et al. (2025) discuss evidence for an innate sense of object number (numerosity) in the brains of many species, without the need for visual experience. This commentary discusses how numerosity processing can be understood as an innate property of vision, derived from the spatial frequency-based representation of images in the visual systems of many animals.