Track: High School STEM Poster Competition

Abstract

Subitizing, the ability of people to unconsciously and accurately count sufficiently small quantities of objects, is heavily tied to both visual perception and a somewhat fundamental understanding of mathematics. Peripheral vision, despite its wide range, has relatively poor visual acuity relative to central vision, which is primarily used when one focuses on an object. By using a custom testing interface (which flashed an image for a specific duration of time) and logging the result, it was possible to see the effect that peripheral vision, and by extension its reduced perception, had on the ability of one to subitize. The results indicated that there was a statistically significant difference for the accuracies between central vision and peripheral vision, but such a difference was not found between near peripheral vision and far peripheral vision.