Number trumps area for 7-month-old infants

摘要

Over the past few decades there has been extensive debate as to whether humans represent number abstractly and if so, whether perceptual features of a set such as cumulative surface area or contour length are extracted more readily from the external world than number. Here we show that 7-month-old infants are sensitive to smaller ratio changes in number than cumulative area when each variable is tested separately and that infants prefer to look at number changes compared to area changes when the two variables are directly pitted against each other. Our results provide strong evidence that number is a more salient dimension to young infants than cumulative surface area and that infants’ ability to discriminate sets based on number is more finely tuned than their ability to discriminate sets based on cumulative surface area.