Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center (CNRS UMR 8002), Université Paris Descartes, Paris, France.
PLoS One. 2019 Oct 1;14(10):e0223192. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0223192. eCollection 2019.
Human neonates spontaneously associate changes in magnitude across the dimensions of number, length, and duration. Do these particular associations generalize to other pairs of magnitudes in the same way at birth, or do they reflect an early predisposition to expect specific relations between spatial, temporal, and numerical representations? To begin to answer this question, we investigated how strongly newborns associated auditory sequences changing in number/duration with visual objects changing in levels of brightness. We tested forty-eight newborn infants in one of three, bimodal stimulus conditions in which auditory numbers/durations increased or decreased from a familiarization trial to the two test trials. Auditory numbers/durations were paired with visual objects in familiarization that remained the same on one test trial but changed in luminance/contrast or shape on the other. On average, results indicated that newborns looked longer when changes in brightness accompanied the number/duration change as compared to no change, a preference that was most consistent when the brightness change was congruent with the number/duration change. For incongruent changes, this preference depended on trial order. Critically, infants showed no preference for a shape change over no shape change, indicating that infants likely treated brightness differently than a generic feature. Though this performance pattern is somewhat similar to previously documented associations, these findings suggest that cross-magnitude associations among number, length, and duration may be more specialized at birth, rather than emerge gradually from postnatal experience or maturation.
人类新生儿会自发地将数量、长度和时长这三个维度上的大小变化联系起来。这些特定的关联是否会在出生时以同样的方式推广到其他对大小的组合，或者它们是否反映了一种早期的倾向，即期望空间、时间和数字表示之间存在特定的关系？为了开始回答这个问题，我们研究了新生儿在多大程度上将数量/时长变化的听觉序列与亮度变化的视觉对象联系起来。我们在三种双模态刺激条件中的一种条件下测试了 48 名新生儿，在这种条件下，听觉数量/时长从熟悉阶段增加或减少到两个测试阶段。在熟悉阶段，听觉数量/时长与视觉对象配对，在一个测试阶段保持不变，但在另一个测试阶段亮度/对比度或形状发生变化。平均而言，结果表明，与没有变化相比，当亮度变化伴随着数量/时长变化时，新生儿的注视时间更长，这种偏好当亮度变化与数量/时长变化一致时最为一致。对于不一致的变化，这种偏好取决于试验顺序。关键是，婴儿对形状变化没有偏好，表明婴儿可能对亮度的处理方式与通用特征不同。尽管这种表现模式与之前记录的关联有些相似，但这些发现表明，数量、长度和时长之间的跨大小关联在出生时可能更加专业化，而不是从产后经验或成熟中逐渐出现。
