Although young infants have repeatedly demonstrated successful numerosity discrimination across large sets when the number of items in the sets changes twofold (E. M. Brannon. S. Abbott, & D. J. Lutz, 2004 J. N. Wood & E. S. Spelke, 2005; F. Xu & E. S. Spelke, 2000), they consistently fail to discriminate a twofold change in number when one set is large and the other is small (<4 items; F. Feigenson, S. Carey, & M. Hauser, 2002; F. Xu, 2003). It has been theorized that this failure reflects an incompatibility in representational systems for small and large sets. The authors investigated the ability of 7-month-old infants to compare small and large sets over a variety of conditions. Results reveal that infants can successfully discriminate small from large sets when given a fourfold change, but not a twofold change, in number. The implications of these results are discussed in light of current theories of number representation.
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