Could it be somehow related to better peripheral vision?
I met a woman once who could gather four-leaf clovers nearly instantly, at the same spot where me and my male friends had spent minutes searching.
I've seen written in some places (but could not find a worthy source) that women might have better peripheral vision due to food gathering in prehistoric times, but this might just be some old sexist construct (if anyone knows a good source to confirm or refute this, please tell me).
Funny anecdata: in my circle of friends, the trait that best predicts Set skill isn't IQ or gender or anything like that, it's musical ability.
This came up at a party. Six people playing Set, all of us from different cities, and the three that took band in high school utterly dominated the three that didn't. The reason? Field trips. The Band kids had all played Set for hours on buses, the rest of us had only played it once or twice and lost interest.
I like how you introduce a correlating attribute in the beginning of your comment, get me thinking about the relationship between musical ability and set-identifying ability, then clobber whatever hypothesis I was putting together just as fast with the confounding "field trips" variable.
I'd guess that the players on a football team would be reviewing the playbook all the way up until kickoff. Meanwhile the band isn't going to be practicing their performance on the bus.
"Subitizing is the rapid, accurate, and confident judgement of numbers performed for small numbers of items. [...]
The accuracy, speed, and confidence with which observers make judgments of the number of items are critically dependent on the number of elements to be enumerated. Judgments made for displays composed of around one to four items are rapid, accurate and confident."
I don't know if that's a male/female trait. I literally find four leaf clovers so often/fast that I don't even consciousnessly know how I do it. I'll just reach down and grab them.
As a kid I would find them all the time. These days if I end up standing around a clover patch with nothing to do, I always look for them but never find them. I can't imagine I had the patience to look for them as a kid for very long, so I feel that my ability must have gone down hill OR that the patches I'm by now just don't have as many of them. I was always convinced that the ones at the house I grew up at had an abundance of four (or higher) leafed clovers and that patches at school, for example, were relatively poor.
Perhaps that ability decline is just my current reluctance to get down on my hands and knees and leaf through them by hand.
My mother is like this with four-leaf clovers. We can be walking together and having a conversation, and she'll stop mid-stride and pick up a four-leaf clover that any normal person would have had to stop and hunt for. I definitely did not inherit this skill - I can't recall ever having found one.
> Go players activate the brain region of vision, and literally think by seeing the board state. A lot of Go study is seeing patterns and shapes... 4-point bend is life, or Ko in the corner, Crane Nest, Tiger Mouth, the Ladder... etc. etc.
> Go has probably been so hard for computers to "solve" not because Go is "harder" than Chess (it is... but I don't think that's the primary reason), but instead because humans brains are innately wired to be better at Go than at Chess. The vision-area of the human's brain is very large, and "hacking" the vision center of the brain to make it think about Go is very effective.
I met a woman once who could gather four-leaf clovers nearly instantly, at the same spot where me and my male friends had spent minutes searching.
I've seen written in some places (but could not find a worthy source) that women might have better peripheral vision due to food gathering in prehistoric times, but this might just be some old sexist construct (if anyone knows a good source to confirm or refute this, please tell me).