Gerbrand Anton, Gredebäck Gustaf, Lindskog Marcus
Uppsala Child and Babylab, Uppsala Universitet, Department of psychology, Sweden.
R Soc Open Sci. 2023 Oct 25;10(10):230474. doi: 10.1098/rsos.230474. eCollection 2023 Oct.
Previous research suggests that subset-knowers have an approximate understanding of small numbers. However, it is still unclear exactly what subset-knowers understand about small numbers. To investigate this further, we tested 133 participants, ages 2.6-4 years, on a newly developed eye-tracking task targeting cardinal recognition. Participants were presented with two sets differing in cardinality (1-4 items) and asked to find a specific cardinality. Our main finding showed that on a group level, subset-knowers could identify all presented targets at rates above chance, further supporting that subset-knowers understand several of the basic principles of small numbers. Exploratory analyses tentatively suggest that 1-knowers could identify the targets 1 and 2, but struggled when the target was 3 and 4, whereas 2-knowers and above could identify all targets at rates above chance. This might tentatively suggest that subset-knowers have an approximate understanding of numbers that is just (i.e. +1) above their current knower level. We discuss the implications of these results at length.
先前的研究表明,子集知晓者对小数目有大致的理解。然而,子集知晓者到底对子数目理解了什么仍不清楚。为了进一步研究这一点,我们对133名年龄在2.6至4岁之间的参与者进行了一项新开发的针对基数识别的眼动追踪任务测试。向参与者展示两组基数不同(1至4个物品)的集合,并要求他们找出特定的基数。我们的主要发现表明,在群体层面上,子集知晓者能够以高于随机概率的比率识别所有呈现的目标,这进一步支持了子集知晓者理解小数目的一些基本原理。探索性分析初步表明,“1知晓者”能够识别目标1和2,但当目标是3和4时就会遇到困难,而“2知晓者”及以上水平的人能够以高于随机概率的比率识别所有目标。这可能初步表明,子集知晓者对数字的大致理解仅比他们当前的知晓者水平高一个(即 +1)。我们详细讨论了这些结果的含义。