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Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
Published on: April 19, 2017
Ratio abstraction by 6-month-old infants.
1Yale University, USA. mccrink@wjh.harvard.edu
Psychological Science
|August 8, 2007
Summary
Six-month-old infants can extract common ratios from visual scenes. They successfully discriminated ratios differing by a factor of 2 but not 1.5, suggesting an approximate magnitude-estimation system.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Development
- Infant Perception
- Numerical Cognition
Background:
- Human infants demonstrate early mathematical abilities, including basic arithmetic and ordering.
- Previous research suggests infants possess rudimentary numerical understanding.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether 6-month-old infants can extract and generalize common ratios from visual stimuli.
- To explore the precision of infant ratio discrimination.
Main Methods:
- Infants were habituated to multiple examples of a specific visual ratio.
- Following habituation, infants were presented with novel examples of the habituated ratio and a new ratio.
- Discrimination was assessed by measuring infant looking times or behavioral responses.
Main Results:
- Infants successfully discriminated between ratios that differed by a factor of 2.
- Infants failed to detect differences between ratios that differed by a factor of 1.5.
- This indicates a threshold for ratio discrimination in young infants.
Conclusions:
- Infants can extract and utilize ratio information across different visual displays.
- The findings support the existence of an approximate magnitude-estimation system in infants.
- This system appears to be consistent with similar systems observed in adult humans and animals.
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