Previous studies observed that neural network models develop numerosity-selective units when trained to perform object classification,
without explicit training on numerosity. However, the emergentist view was challenged by the finding that selectivity disappears
with larger sample sizes for model evaluation. Here, we investigate whether this finding was due to the qualitative visual
mismatch between training and evaluation data. We present experiments with three types of neural networks, optimized either
for object classification, numerosity, or both. Using a novel dataset in which both training and evaluation images include
daily-life objects, we analyze layer and single-unit selectivity on a range of conditions, varying the visual properties of
our evaluation images. Our results suggest that numerosity classification performance is exclusive to numerosity trained networks.
Moreover, we observe a discrepancy between single-unit numerosity selectivity, compared to overall network performance. This
suggests that numerosity may be represented through different encoding patterns than previously assumed.
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