Infants' Auditory Enumeration: Evidence for Analog Magnitudes in the Small Number Range

Autor/inn/en	vanMarle, Kristy; Wynn, Karen
Titel	Infants' Auditory Enumeration: Evidence for Analog Magnitudes in the Small Number Range
Quelle	In: Cognition, 111 (2009) 3, S.302-316 (15 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0010-0277
DOI	10.1016/j.cognition.2009.01.011
Schlagwörter	Infants; Auditory Discrimination; Number Concepts; Logical Thinking + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Infant; Toddler; Toddlers; Kleinkind; Number concept; Zahlbegriff
Abstract	Vigorous debate surrounds the issue of whether infants use different representational mechanisms to discriminate small and large numbers. We report evidence for ratio-dependent performance in infants' discrimination of small numbers of auditory events, suggesting that infants can use analog magnitudes to represent small values, at least in the auditory domain. Seven-month-old infants in the present study reliably discriminated two from four tones (a 1:2 ratio) in Experiment 1, when melodic and continuous temporal properties of the sequences were controlled, but failed to discriminate two from three tones (a 2:3 ratio) under the same conditions in Experiment 2. A third experiment ruled out the possibility that infants in Experiment 1 were responding to greater melodic variety in the four-tone sequences. The discrimination function obtained here is the same as that found for infants' discrimination of large numbers of visual and auditory items at a similar age, as well as for that obtained for similar-aged infants' duration discriminations, and thus adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that human infants may share with adults and nonhuman animals a mechanism for representing quantities as "noisy" mental magnitudes. (Contains 4 figures.) (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10