Numerosity Is Directly Sensed and Dynamically Transformed in the Human Brain: Evidence from MEG-MRI Fusion

Humans can estimate the number of objects in a scene within a fraction of a second, suggesting that numerosity is encoded rapidly and directly by the visual system. Yet how this encoding unfolds over time and interacts with other visual features remains unclear. Here, we combined magnetoencephalography (MEG) with time-resolved representational similarity analysis (RSA) and MEG–fMRI fusion to track how numerosity is represented in the brain over time. We also used multidimensional scaling (MDS) to visualize the evolving patterns of neural activity. Two main findings emerged. First, numerosity exhibited the hallmarks of a primary perceptual attribute: its neural signature appeared rapidly after stimulus onset, preceding the encoding of non-numeric features that could otherwise define number. Second, Visualization of the neural patterns using MDS suggested a temporal transformation in representational geometry, reflecting the engagement of two distinct coding schemes- an early, linear number line, consistent with a “summation code”, dominating activity in occipital regions, and a later, curved number line, consistent with “numerosity-tuned code”, emerging more strongly in associative areas along the dorsal stream. Together, these findings demonstrate that numerosity processing is encoded directly from the visual image and unfolds through a rapid hierarchical transformation, from a broad quantity signal to a finely tuned, number-specific code, linking perceptual encoding to higher-level numerical abstraction.