Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center, Université Paris Cité, National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), F-75006 Paris, France.
Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, 20126 Milan, Italy.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2024 Jan;237:105758. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2023.105758. Epub 2023 Aug 12.
Adults' concurrent processing of numerical and action information yields bidirectional interference effects consistent with a cognitive link between these two systems of representation. This link is in place early in life: infants create expectations of congruency across numerical and action-related stimuli (i.e., a small [large] hand aperture associated with a smaller [larger] numerosity). Although these studies point to a developmental continuity of this mapping, little is known about the later development and thus how experience shapes such relationships. We explored how number-action intuitions develop across early and later childhood using the same methodology as in adults. We asked 3-, 6-, and 8-year-old children, as well as adults, to relate the magnitude of an observed action (a static hand shape, open vs. closed, in Experiment 1; a dynamic hand movement, opening vs. closing, in Experiment 2) to either a small or large nonsymbolic quantity (numerosity in Experiment 1 and numerosity and/or object size in Experiment 2). From 6 years of age, children started performing in a systematic congruent way in some conditions, but only 8-year-olds (added in Experiment 2) and adults performed reliably above chance in this task. We provide initial evidence that early intuitions guiding infants' mapping between magnitude across nonsymbolic number and observed action are used in an explicit way only from late childhood, with a mapping between action and size possibly being the most intuitive. An initial coarse mapping between number and action is likely modulated with extensive experience with grasping and related actions directed to both arrays and individual objects.
成年人对数值和动作信息的并发处理产生了双向干扰效应，这与这两个表示系统之间的认知联系一致。这种联系在生命早期就存在：婴儿会对数值和与动作相关的刺激之间的一致性产生期望（即，小[大]手孔与较小[较大]的数值相对应）。尽管这些研究表明这种映射具有发展连续性，但对于后期发展知之甚少，因此，经验如何塑造这种关系尚不清楚。我们使用与成人相同的方法，探索了数量-动作直觉如何在幼儿期和后期发展。我们要求 3 岁、6 岁和 8 岁的儿童以及成年人将观察到的动作的大小（实验 1 中的静态手形，打开与关闭；实验 2 中的动态手运动，打开与关闭）与小或大的非符号数量（实验 1 中的数值和/或实验 2 中的数值和/或对象大小）相关联。从 6 岁开始，儿童在某些条件下开始以系统的方式进行一致的表现，但只有 8 岁的儿童（在实验 2 中加入）和成年人在这项任务中可靠地表现出高于随机的表现。我们提供了初步的证据，即引导婴儿在非符号数量和观察到的动作之间进行映射的早期直觉仅在儿童后期才以明确的方式使用，并且动作和大小之间的映射可能是最直观的。与抓取和针对数组和单个对象的相关动作的广泛经验相结合，可能会对数量和动作之间的初步粗略映射进行调制。
