Université de Paris, INCC UMR 8002, CNRS, 75006, Paris, France.
Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center-CNRS UMR 8002, CNRS, Université de Paris, 45 Rue des Saints Pères, 75270, Paris Cedex 06, France.
Sci Rep. 2022 Mar 1;12(1):3371. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-07389-9.
Humans' inborn ability to represent and manipulate numerical quantities is supported by the parietal cortex, which is also involved in a variety of spatial and motor abilities. While the behavioral links between numerical and spatial information have been extensively studied, little is known about the connection between number and action. Some studies in adults have shown a series of interference effects when simultaneously processing numerical and action information. We investigated the origins of this link by testing forty infants (7- to 9-month-old) in one of two experimental conditions: one group was habituated to congruent number-hand pairings, where the larger the number, the more open the hand-shape associated; the second group was habituated to incongruent number-hand pairings, where the larger the number, the more close the hand-shape associated. In test trials, both groups of infants were presented with congruent and incongruent pairings. We found that only infants habituated to congruency showed a significantly higher looking time to the test trial depicting incongruent pairings. These findings show for the first time that infants spontaneously associate magnitude-related changes across the dimensions of number and action-related information, thus offering support to the existence of an early, preverbal number-action link in the human mind.
人类对数字数量的表示和操纵的天生能力是由顶叶皮层支持的，顶叶皮层也参与了各种空间和运动能力。虽然已经广泛研究了数字和空间信息之间的行为联系，但对于数字和动作之间的联系知之甚少。一些成人研究表明，当同时处理数字和动作信息时，会出现一系列干扰效应。我们通过在两种实验条件下测试四十名婴儿（7 至 9 个月大）来研究这种联系的起源：一组婴儿习惯于一致的数字-手配对，即数字越大，相关的手形越张开；第二组婴儿习惯于不一致的数字-手配对，即数字越大，相关的手形越闭合。在测试试验中，两组婴儿都呈现了一致和不一致的配对。我们发现，只有习惯于一致性的婴儿在测试试验中表现出对描绘不一致配对的明显更高的注视时间。这些发现首次表明，婴儿会自发地将数量和动作相关信息维度上的大小相关变化联系起来，从而为人类思维中存在早期、非言语的数字-动作联系提供了支持。
