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Published on: January 23, 2017
Infants' discrimination of number vs. continuous extent
Lisa Feigenson1, Susan Carey, Elizabeth Spelke
1Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA. lf255@nyu.edu
Cognitive Psychology
|January 30, 2002
Summary
Infants may not inherently grasp number concepts. Studies suggest early numerical abilities might actually be responses to visual properties like size and shape, not quantities.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Developmental Psychology
- Infant Cognition
Background:
- Claims of infants representing cardinal values of small object sets are prevalent.
- Previous numerical ability studies often failed to control for continuous stimulus properties like surface area or volume.
Purpose of the Study:
- To empirically investigate the basis of infants' supposed cardinal value representations.
- To determine if infants respond to numerical quantity or continuous properties in object arrays.
Main Methods:
- Utilized the habituation/dishabituation paradigm with 1 vs 2 object comparisons.
- Pitted number against total front surface area in controlled experiments.
- Extended findings to the Wynn (1992) object transformation task.
Main Results:
- Infants discriminated arrays when number and surface area were confounded.
- Infants responded to changes in surface area, not number, when pitted against each other.
- No sensitivity to number was found when surface area was controlled.
Conclusions:
- Infants' performance in numerical tasks may be driven by object-based attention to continuous properties.
- Findings challenge the hypothesis that infants possess innate enumeration abilities.
- Sensitivity to continuous dimensions, not quantity, likely underlies performance in these tasks.
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