Predicting sights from sounds: 6-month-olds' intermodal numerical abilities.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• The study of infants' nonsymbolic number representations is well-established.
• However, characteristics of the approximate number system (ANS) in young children, particularly its abstract nature, remain less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether the approximate number system (ANS) in infants generates abstract representations.
• To determine if infants can transfer approximate number representations across different sensory modalities.

Main Methods:

• Three experiments were conducted with 6-month-old infants.
• Infants' looking behavior was measured to assess their ability to match auditory sequences to visual arrays based on approximate number.

Main Results:

• Infants demonstrated a looking preference for visual arrays that numerically mismatched previously heard auditory sequences.
• This cross-modal matching was observed for ratios of 1:3 and 1:2, but not for a 2:3 ratio.
• The acuity of intermodal numerical comparisons in 6-month-olds paralleled their unimodal comparison acuity.

Conclusions:

• Six-month-old infants possess the ability to compare numerical information across different sensory modalities.
• This suggests that infants form abstract representations of approximate number that are not tied to a specific sensory input.
• Early numerical cognition in infants is more flexible and abstract than previously assumed.