Farzin Faraz, Charles Eric P, Rivera Susan M
Department of Psychology University of California, Davis.
Infancy. 2009 Sep 10;14(5):563-578. doi: 10.1080/15250000903144207. Epub 2009 Sep 1.
A number of studies have investigated infants' abilities to extract and discriminate number from multimodal events. These results have been mixed for several possible reasons, including aspects of the experimental design that provide perceptual cues that are unrelated to number, and are known to influence looking preferences. This experiment used a preferential looking paradigm to investigate whether 6- to 9-month-old infants can extract the amodal property of number from an arbitrarily related multimodal event sequence when nonnumerical confounds are removed. Results demonstrate that female infants discriminate number from a multimodal presentation by 6 months, whereas males do so by 8 months. Further, the study underscores the importance of controlling for low-level perceptual cues in looking time experiments aimed at examining infants' cognitive abilities.
多项研究探讨了婴儿从多模态事件中提取和区分数字的能力。由于多种可能的原因，这些结果参差不齐，包括实验设计中提供与数字无关的感知线索的方面，而这些线索已知会影响注视偏好。本实验采用优先注视范式，以研究在消除非数字混淆因素的情况下，6至9个月大的婴儿是否能够从任意相关的多模态事件序列中提取数字的抽象属性。结果表明，6个月大的女婴能够从多模态呈现中区分数字，而男婴则在8个月大时才能做到。此外，该研究强调了在旨在检验婴儿认知能力的注视时间实验中控制低水平感知线索的重要性。
