Coubart Aurélie, Streri Arlette, de Hevia Maria Dolores, Izard Véronique
Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France; CNRS UMR 8242, Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Paris, France.
PLoS One. 2015 Mar 23;10(3):e0120868. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0120868. eCollection 2015.
Infants are known to possess two different cognitive systems to encode numerical information. The first system encodes approximate numerosities, has no known upper limit and is functional from birth on. The second system relies on infants' ability to track up to 3 objects in parallel, and enables them to represent exact numerosity for such small sets. It is unclear, however, whether infants may be able to represent numerosities from all ranges in a common format. In various studies, infants failed to discriminate a small vs. a large numerosity (e.g., 2 vs. 4, 3 vs. 6), although more recent studies presented evidence that infants can succeed at these discriminations in some situations. Here, we used a transfer paradigm between the tactile and visual modalities in 5-month-olds, assuming that such cross-modal paradigm may promote access to abstract representations of numerosities, continuous across the small and large ranges. Infants were first familiarized with 2 to 4 objects in the tactile modality, and subsequently tested for their preference between 2 vs. 4, or 3 vs. 6 visual objects. Results were mixed, with only partial evidence that infants may have transferred numerical information across modalities. Implications on 5-month-old infants' ability to represent small and large numerosities in a single or in separate formats are discussed.
众所周知，婴儿拥有两种不同的认知系统来编码数字信息。第一种系统编码近似数量，没有已知的上限，从出生起就起作用。第二种系统依赖于婴儿同时追踪多达3个物体的能力，并使他们能够表示如此小的集合的精确数量。然而，尚不清楚婴儿是否能够以一种通用格式表示所有范围内的数量。在各种研究中，婴儿未能区分小数量和大数量（例如，2对4、3对6），尽管最近的研究提供了证据表明婴儿在某些情况下能够成功进行这些区分。在这里，我们在5个月大的婴儿中使用了触觉和视觉模态之间的转换范式，假设这种跨模态范式可能有助于获取数量的抽象表示，这种表示在小范围和大范围中是连续的。婴儿首先在触觉模态中熟悉2到4个物体，随后测试他们对2对4或3对6个视觉物体的偏好。结果喜忧参半，只有部分证据表明婴儿可能跨模态传递了数字信息。讨论了关于5个月大婴儿以单一或不同格式表示小数量和大数量的能力的影响。
