Spontaneous perception of visuospatial ensembles.

Look out at a forest. What do you see? You see visual masses of green; you see large numbers of leaves; you see the various sizes of the many different trees. Is one of those features more salient than the others? According to a popular view in cognitive science, number is perceptually prioritized over other visuospatial ensemble properties like density and size, such that when you look out at a forest, what you see first and foremost is the number of trees (or trunks, or leaves) rather than their size or their density, etc. The problem with these arguments is that they mostly hinge on comparisons to only one other dimension: cumulative area. Here, we ask a very simple question: Might there be some other dimension that is prioritized over number? Across five unique paradigms and 13 experiments with over 2,000 participants, we show that human adults prioritize average size over number, such that they are more likely to (a) categorize, (b) explicitly match, (c) notice changes in, and (d) identify extreme instances of that dimension. We additionally show that children behave the same way. For this reason, we argue against the universal salience of number, noting that these "competitive" approaches (i.e., in which dimensions are compared against each other) are often context-dependent. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).