Newborn infants perceive abstract numbers

By Véronique Izard, Coralie Sann, Elizabeth S. Spelke, A. Streri. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009

694 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although infants and animals respond to the approximate number of elements in visual, auditory, and tactile arrays, only human children and adults have been shown to possess abstract numerical representations that apply to entities of all kinds (e.g., 7 samurai, seas, or sins). Do abstract numerical concepts depend on language or culture, or do they form a part of humans' innate, core knowledge? Here we show that newborn infants spontaneously associate stationary, visual-spatial arrays of 4–18 objects with auditory sequences of events on the basis of number. Their performance provides evidence for abstract numerical representations at the start of postnatal experience.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f21c3bd72d7b221dd9daf8ce4805720e9fd59f6

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Origins and Development of Generalized Magnitude Representation (2011, background): “system limited to the big three magnitudes, or does it incorporate other dimensions such as pitch and luminance? Does cross-dimensional transfer operate primarily across visual stimuli, as used in recent studies, or does it extend across sensory modalities, as has been shown for number where infants”
Developmental trajectory of number acuity reveals a severe impairment in developmental dyscalculia. (2010, background): “…also coherent with previous observations on babies, where the critical ratio needed for numerosity discrimination was found to decrease dramatically within the first year of life from 3:1 soon after birth (Izard et al., 2009), to 2:1 at 6 months and down to 3:2 at 9-months (Lipton & Spelke, 2003).”
Two Systems for Mindreading? (2016, background): “They say that the early-developing mindreading system is like the approximate numerosity system that is known to be present in young infants (Izard et al. 2009), and which continues to exist alongside the adult exact number system that children only acquire much later (Barth et al. 2003).”
Child Development in the Context of Adversity (2012, background): “…canalization of development is that these models of parent skills training often engage parents through attention to parents' own regulatory profiles of affect, behavior, and cognition in conditions of high environmental stress (Dishion et al., 2008; Izard et al., 2009; Fisher & Stoolmiller, 2008).”
ABX-Discriminability Measures and Applications. (Mesures de discriminabilité ABX et applications) (2016, neutral): “solids [50], number categories [51], etc.”
Natural Number and Natural Geometry (2011, background): “[7] serves to introduce the first core system.”
Valence and Value (2018, neutral): “For comparison, consider nonconceptual representations of approximate numerosity, of the sort entertained by infants and nonhuman animals (and also by adult humans) (Barth et al., 2003; Jordan et al., 2008; Izard et al., 2009).”