The Evolutionary Economics of Subitization

June 1st, 2006 Fred McVittie

The ability of humans and most animals to innately recognise the numerosity of small numbers of objects , an ability usually referred to as subitizing, must have its origins in the evolution of perception and the psychology which supports it. This paper will argue that one possible source of such an adaptive pressure is the allocation of resources within social groups, and the need to balance the needs of the individual with the competing needs of others. Prior to the availability of a sophisticated system of numbering (which might be estimating or counting), it will be proposed that resources can be shared between two parties in ways involving three basic schema;

• Uneven A (in which one party to the sharing receives zero)
• Even (in which both parties to the sharing receive equal amounts)
• Uneven B (in which one party to the sharing receives more than the other)

These schema can be represented as:

0|
0|0
0|00

It can be noted that all the variations of equal and unequal distribution can be represented by these three schema, and when these are reduced to groupings:

0
00
000

It is immediately evident whether such groupings lend themselves to a equal or unequal sharing schema. It follows from this that within social situations there would be an adaptive pressure to distinguish such groupings in order to manage the allocation of resources to meet the competing demands on those resources by individual need and the need of the other. Such an adaptive pressure would express itself in abstract terms as an innate ability to recognise these schema without counting or estimating, an ability corresponding to subitizing.

It may be noted in passing that this derivation also creates the concept of the zero, expressed as the absent term in distribution schema uneven A.

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