Infant number perception is a topic that has been studied for many years,
but many questions remain regarding what cues infants use to make these
discriminations, when and how these abilities develop, and what systems are
responsible for infants’ number processing. In the domain of small number
perception (quantities less than four), researchers have studied the effects of
continuous extent on infants’ number discrimination (Clearfield & Mix, 1999;
2001). While evidence exists that infants can use continuous extent to make
discriminations, it is not clear how much influence continuous extent has on
infants’ behavior in these tasks. Another issue that has not been thoroughly
addressed is the role of featural information in number discrimination. Few
studies exist in which featural information is manipulated so that this issue can be
addressed. The current study was designed to address these issues as well as to
study infant number discrimination from a developmental perspective across several ages. Infants, aged 9-, 11-, and 13-months, completed a categorization
task in which they were habituated to pictures of objects (e.g. bowl, tree, shoe) in
either groups of two or groups of three. They saw four different sets of objects
throughout habituation. In the test phase, infants saw both new and old objects in
both groups of two and three. The 9-month-olds discriminated number
independent of whether the object was familiar or novel. In contrast, the 11-
month-olds appeared to discriminate between the familiar and novel objects.
And, the 13-month-olds exhibited a combination of these two patterns; they
discriminated between the familiar and novel object when the number of objects
was familiar, but not when the number of objects was novel. These data suggest
that number is an easily abstracted construct and that early number
representations do not contain any featural information. As infants get older, they
begin to incorporate featural information into their representations, but they do so
in a step-wise fashion, as demonstrated by the 13-month-olds. Therefore, featural
information does not appear to be important for small number discrimination at
early ages, but infants do begin to integrate featural information as they develop. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/7551 |
| Date | 01 June 2010 |
| Creators | Brez, Caitlin Christine |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | electronic |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author. Presentation of this material on the Libraries' web site by University Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin was made possible under a limited license grant from the author who has retained all copyrights in the works. |
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