Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA.
Cognition. 2013 Sep;128(3):331-52. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.04.008. Epub 2013 Jun 7.
Considerable research has investigated infants' numerical capacities. Studies in this domain have used procedures of habituation, head turn, violation of expectation, reaching, and crawling to ask what quantities infants discriminate and represent visually, auditorily as well as intermodally. The concensus view from these studies is that infants possess a numerical system that is amodal and applicable to the quantification of any kind of entity and that this system is fundamentally separate from other systems that represent continuous magnitude. Although there is much evidence consistent with this view, there are also inconsistencies in the data. This paper provides a broad review of what we know, including the evidence suggesting systematic early knowledge as well as the peculiarities and gaps in the empirical findings with respect to the concensus view. We argue, from these inconsistencies, that the concensus view cannot be entirely correct. In light of the evidence, we propose a new hypothesis, the Signal Clarity hypothesis, that posits a developmental role for dimensions of continuous quantity within the discrete quantity system and calls for a broader research agenda that considers the covariation of discrete and continuous quantities not simply as a problem for experimental control but as information that developing infants may use to build more precise and robust representations of number.
大量研究已经调查了婴儿的数量能力。该领域的研究使用习惯化、转头、违反预期、伸手和爬行等程序来询问婴儿在视觉、听觉以及感觉模式下可以区分和表示哪些数量。这些研究的共识观点是，婴儿拥有一种非模态的数量系统，可以应用于任何类型的实体的量化，并且该系统与表示连续量的其他系统从根本上是分开的。尽管有很多证据支持这种观点，但数据也存在不一致。本文提供了对我们所知道的内容的广泛回顾，包括表明系统的早期知识的证据，以及与共识观点相比，实证研究结果的特殊性和差距。我们从这些不一致中得出结论，认为共识观点不可能完全正确。鉴于这些证据，我们提出了一个新的假设，即信号清晰度假设，该假设认为连续数量的维度在离散数量系统中具有发展作用，并呼吁制定一个更广泛的研究议程，该议程不仅将离散数量和连续数量的共变视为实验控制的问题，还将其视为发展中的婴儿可能用于构建更精确和稳健的数量表示的信息。
