Feigenson Lisa, Carey Susan
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA.
Cognition. 2005 Oct;97(3):295-313. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2004.09.010. Epub 2004 Dec 30.
Recent work suggests that infants rely on mechanisms of object-based attention and short-term memory to represent small numbers of objects. Such work shows that infants discriminate arrays containing 1, 2, or 3 objects, but fail with arrays greater than 3 [Feigenson, L., & Carey, S. (2003). Tracking individuals via object-files: Evidence from infants' manual search. Developmental Science, 6, 568-584; Feigenson, L., Carey, S., & Hauser, M. (2002). The representations underlying infants' choice of more: Object files versus analog magnitudes. Psychological Science, 13(2), 150-156]. However, little is known about how infants represent arrays exceeding the 3-item limit of parallel representation. We explored possible formats by which infants might represent a 4-object array. Experiment 1 used a manual search paradigm to show that infants successfully discriminated between arrays of 1 vs. 2, 2 vs. 3, and 1 vs. 3 objects. However, infants failed to discriminate 1 vs. 4 despite the highly discriminable ratio, providing the strongest evidence to date for object-file representations underlying performance in this task. Experiment 2 replicated this dramatic failure to discriminate 1 from 4 in a second paradigm, a cracker choice task. We then showed that infants in the choice task succeeded at choosing the larger quantity with 0 vs. 4 crackers and with 1 small vs. 4 large crackers. These results suggest that while infants failed to represent 4 as "exactly 4", "approximately 4", "3", or as even as "a plurality", they did represent information about the array, including the existence of a cracker or cracker-material and the size of the individual objects in the array.
近期研究表明，婴儿依靠基于物体的注意力机制和短期记忆来表征少量物体。此类研究表明，婴儿能够区分包含1个、2个或3个物体的阵列，但对于多于3个物体的阵列则无法区分[费根森，L.，& 凯里，S.（2003年）。通过物体档案追踪个体：来自婴儿手动搜索的证据。《发展科学》，6，568 - 584；费根森，L.，凯里，S.，& 豪泽，M.（2002年）。婴儿选择更多时的表征基础：物体档案与模拟数量。《心理科学》，13(2)，150 - 156]。然而，对于婴儿如何表征超出并行表征3个项目限制的阵列，我们知之甚少。我们探究了婴儿可能用来表征4个物体阵列的可能形式。实验1采用手动搜索范式，结果显示婴儿能够成功区分1个与2个、2个与3个以及1个与3个物体的阵列。然而，尽管比例差异明显，婴儿却无法区分1个与4个物体的阵列，这为该任务表现背后的物体档案表征提供了迄今为止最有力的证据。实验2在第二个范式即饼干选择任务中重复了这种无法区分1个与4个物体的显著失败。然后我们发现，在选择任务中，婴儿在面对0个与4个饼干以及1个小饼干与4个大饼干时能够成功选择数量更多的。这些结果表明，虽然婴儿无法将4表征为“恰好4”“大约4”“3”甚至“多个”，但他们确实表征了关于阵列的信息，包括饼干或饼干材料的存在以及阵列中单个物体的大小。
