Facoltà di Psicologia, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy.
Infant Behav Dev. 2012 Dec;35(4):751-60. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2012.05.009. Epub 2012 Sep 12.
This study presents the first evidence that 3-month-old infants success in a timing matching task and in an ordinal timing task, when numerical information is controlled. Three-month-old infants discriminated brief temporal durations that differed by a 1:3 ratio, relying solely on temporal information. Moreover, at 3 months of age infants were able to discriminate between monotonic and non-monotonic time-based series, when numerical and temporal information were inconsistent. These findings strengthen the hypothesis that a magnitude representational system for temporal quantities is operating very early in the ontogenetic development.
这项研究首次表明，三个月大的婴儿在计时匹配任务和序贯计时任务中取得成功，此时控制了数值信息。三个月大的婴儿仅依靠时间信息就能区分相差 1:3 比例的短暂时间间隔。此外，在三个月大时，当数值和时间信息不一致时，婴儿能够区分单调和非单调基于时间的序列。这些发现支持了这样一种假设，即在个体发生发展的早期，就存在一个用于时间量的数量表示系统。
