I took the test a few more times and found that i was able to get a much higher score-didn’t repeat at least 25 times as required to obtain an accurate result-my average result might have been lower had i continued. The site indicates that the average result is around 75%, but doesn’t indicate the average score of people good at maths-presumably the difference is measurable but might not be that much higher.
The test is a measure of our ability to compare quantity and here is a list of the quantities over several tests.
10-12 15-11 13-8 7-5 12-8 10-6 10-8 10-7 12-6 10-5 8-7 10-5 8-5 9-12 11-5 10-7 12-9 7-5 6-5 12-15 15-10 9-11
As you can see -the difference between the colors is significant on most. Ratio as with research with babies matters
“Experiments 1 and 2 investigated whether infants/babies ’ numerosity discrimination depends on the ratio of the two set sizes with even larger numerosities. Infants successfully discriminated between arrays of 16 vs. 32 discs, but not 16 vs. 24 discs, providing evidence that their discrimination shows the set-size ratio signature of numerosity discrimination in human adults, children, and many non-human animals.”
The latest research appears to confirm that babies can subitize. Many studies suggest that babies can distinguish quantities up to three (Starkey & Cooper, 1980; Starkey,Spilke&Gelman1990;Strauss & Curtis 1981) This is shown by habituation studies. So long as the numbers are within their subitization range they do not seem to be dependent on the pattern in which the objects are arranged. If a baby is habituated to three items arranged in a triangular pattern (s)he will still treat them as the same old three if they are represented in a straight line. This contrasts with their reaction to numbers over 3. Tan and Bryant(2000) found that these can be recognized if, and only if, the pattern remained the same.
“the error in numerosity representations is
proportional to numerical magnitude, and therefore discriminability between two
numerosities depends on their ratio”
(Starkey & Cooper, 1980):
Slides were projected on a screen in front of babies sitting on their mother’s lap.
The time a baby spent looking at each slide before turning away was carefully
monitored. When the baby started looking elsewhere, a new slide appeared on
the screen. At first, the slides contained two large black dots. During the trials,
the baby was shown the same numbers of dots, though separated horizontally
by different distances. After a while, the baby would start looking at the slides
for shorter and shorter periods of time. This is technically called habituation;
nontechnically, the baby got bored.
The slides were then changed without warning to three black dots. Immediately
the baby started to stare longer, exhibiting what psychologists call a longer
fixation time. The consistent difference of fixation times informs psychologists
that the baby could tell the difference between two and three dots. The experiment
was repeated with the three dots first, then the two dots. The results were
the same. These experiments were first tried with babies between four and five
months of age, but later it was shown that newborn babies at three or four days
showed the same results (Antell & Keating, 1983). These findings have been
replicated not just with dots but with slides showing objects of different shapes,
sizes, and alignments (Strauss & Curtis, 1981). Such experiments suggest that
the ability to distinguish small numbers is present in newborns, and thus that
there is at least some innate numerical capacity.
