Humans and Battern Recogniton

How fast can you count?

Will you believe me if I say - for small amount, you do it almost instantly?

Let’s try this small experiment!

Click the black box above to start the experiment. It will only play once!

What did you just see?

How many objects were flashed on the screen?

Did you feel like you had to consciously count them, or did you just "know" the number?

Click here to reveal the answers

Because the image was only shown for a fraction of a second, you didn't have time to consciously count.
But you might have correctly counted that there was one apple in the left and four in the right.
How? Isn't this fascinating?

Now, let’s try that exact same experiment again, but with a different image.

Click the black box above to start the second experiment.

Same questions: What did you just see?

How many objects were flashed on the screen?

Did you count?

Are you as confident this time as you were in the first experiment?

Click here to reveal the answers

This time, you likely had to guess.
The human brain's subitizing ability usually breaks down past 4 or 5 items.
This time, left image has 7 apples while right image has 8.
When presented in a split second, we lose our instant pattern recognition and are forced to fall back on estimation (or consciously counting. that's why I deliberately made it split second).

**Subitizing** is a type of visual pattern recognition where one can instantly tell when there are small number of objects in front of you without actually "counting" them one by one. It highlights how our brains are incredibly optimized for instant pattern recognition rather than step-by-step processing.

Want to test yourself further? Try wolfram’s blog.

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Back to topic. Humans are inherently a powerful pattern recognition engine.

Did you notice the typo in this title page?

Did you notice the Battern… or the Recogniton ?

If you missed the typo - that means your brain substituted the characters automatically. You didn’t read the characters one-by-one, but your eye just skimmed through, skipped the letter-by-letter spelling (like the subitizing experiment), and the word just popped out instantly. All it needs is the “overall shape” and “context of the sentence”. Our brains utilize these rapid shortcuts unconsciously for almost everything we do.

Other pattern recognition that we (unconsciously) do every day:

• Interpreting comedy and parodies
• Audio filtering
• Reading messy handwriting

So, where am I going with this? Well, I want to show you the human-powered pattern recognition engine before we delve into mathematics-powered pattern recognition, and to draw the line about human’s “effortless” pattern recognition vs “conscious” pattern recognition.

Next: Pattern Recognition with Mathematics and Programming