Testing the emergentist theory of number perception throughout development

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Developmental Psychology
• Computational Neuroscience

Background:

• The origin of abstract concepts is debated, with empiricist theories suggesting domain-general learning and nativist theories proposing innate concepts.
• Emergentist accounts, inspired by deep neural networks, propose that abstract concepts like number emerge from learning statistical regularities in sensory input.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test predictions of emergentist models of number perception against human performance.
• To investigate whether number perception is enhanced by stimuli reflecting natural statistical properties (correlation with area, power-law distributions) and if this effect is stronger in children.

Main Methods:

• Adult and child participants (5-9 years old) performed a number estimation task.
• Stimuli were presented with or without statistical properties observed in real-world scenes.

Main Results:

• No significant superiority in number perception was found for stimuli adhering to natural statistics.
• No developmental differences were observed in the predicted direction, contrary to emergentist model predictions.

Conclusions:

• Current emergentist models do not accurately capture the mechanisms of human number perception.
• The findings challenge the idea that abstract number concepts primarily emerge from learning statistical regularities found in natural scenes.