Wynn K
Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson 85721.
Nature. 1992 Aug 27;358(6389):749-50. doi: 10.1038/358749a0.
Human infants can discriminate between different small numbers of items, and can determine numerical equivalence across perceptual modalities. This may indicate the possession of true numerical concepts. Alternatively, purely perceptual discriminations may underlie these abilities. This debate addresses the nature of subitization, the ability to quantify small numbers of items without conscious counting. Subitization may involve the holistic recognition of canonical perceptual patterns that do not reveal ordinal relationships between the numbers, or may instead be an iterative or 'counting' process that specifies these numerical relationships. Here I show that 5-month-old infants can calculate the results of simple arithmetical operations on small numbers of items. This indicates that infants possess true numerical concepts, and suggests that humans are innately endowed with arithmetical abilities. It also suggests that subitization is a process that encodes ordinal information, not a pattern-recognition process yielding non-numerical percepts.
人类婴儿能够区分不同数量的少量物品，并能在不同感知模态下确定数量相等。这可能表明他们拥有真正的数字概念。或者，这些能力可能基于纯粹的感知辨别。这场争论涉及到“数感”的本质，即无需有意识计数就能量化少量物品的能力。数感可能涉及对不揭示数字之间顺序关系的典型感知模式的整体识别，或者可能是一个指定这些数字关系的迭代或“计数”过程。在这里，我表明5个月大的婴儿能够计算少量物品的简单算术运算结果。这表明婴儿拥有真正的数字概念，并表明人类天生就具备算术能力。这也表明数感是一个编码顺序信息的过程，而不是产生非数字感知的模式识别过程。
