University Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, France.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2010 Dec;17(6):840-5. doi: 10.3758/PBR.17.6.840.
We investigated the role of vision in tactile enumeration within and outside the subitizing range. Congenitally blind and sighted (blindfolded) participants were asked to enumerate quickly and accurately the number of fingers stimulated. Both groups of participants enumerated one to three fingers quickly and accurately but were much slower and less accurate with four to nine fingers. Within the subitizing range, blind participants performed no differently from both sighted (blindfolded) and sighted-seeing participants. Outside of the subitizing range, blind and sighted-seeing participants showed better performance than did sighted-blindfolded participants, suggesting that lack of access to the predominant sensory modality does affect performance. Together, these findings further support the claim that subitizing is a general perceptual mechanism and demonstrate that vision is not necessary for the development of the subitizing mechanism.
我们研究了视觉在亚数量（subitizing）范围内和范围外触觉计数中的作用。我们要求先天性失明者和视力正常者（蒙住眼睛）快速准确地数出被刺激的手指数量。两组参与者都能快速准确地数出一到三个手指，但对于四到九个手指则要慢得多，也不准确得多。在亚数量范围内，失明参与者的表现与视力正常（蒙住眼睛）和视力正常（看得见）的参与者没有区别。在亚数量范围之外，失明和视力正常的参与者的表现要好于视力正常蒙住眼睛的参与者，这表明无法使用主要感觉模式会影响表现。总之，这些发现进一步支持了亚数量是一种普遍的感知机制的说法，并表明视觉对于亚数量机制的发展不是必需的。
