The multimodal number sense: spanning space, time, sensory modality, and action

Humans and other animals can estimate rapidly the number of items in a scene, flashes or tones in a sequence and motor actions. Adaptation techniques provide clear evidence in humans for the existence of specialized numerosity mechanisms that make up the numbersense. This sense of number is truly general, encoding the numerosity of both spatial arrays and sequential sets, in vision and audition, and interacting strongly with action. The adaptation (cross-sensory and cross-format) acts on sensory mechanisms rather than decisional processes, pointing to a truly general sense.