Evidence for a non-linguistic distinction between singular and plural sets in rhesus monkeys

Barner, David; Wood, Joanne V.; Hauser, Marc D.; Carey, Susan

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2007.11.010

Cited by 84 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…The outcome was determined by the inappropriate singular/plural opposition. Interestingly, it has been shown recently that monkeys, like children, have a dedicated singular/plural distinction that seems separate from other numerical distinctions (Barner, Wood, Hauser, & Carey, 2008). This finding supports the view that the homophony of the numeral ''un" and the indefinite article in French causes children to mistakenly treat an exact number problem as a singular/plural problem.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 63%

Math in actions: Actor mode reveals the true arithmetic abilities of French-speaking 2-year-olds in a magic task

Lubin

Poirel

Rossi

et al. 2009

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 63%

Math in actions: Actor mode reveals the true arithmetic abilities of French-speaking 2-year-olds in a magic task

Lubin

Poirel

Rossi

et al. 2009

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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“…However, unlike previous studies, the objects (pingpong balls) were fixed with glue to a small presentation board, to ensure that they moved as a united set. Apparently, Gestalt cues like common fate are taken by infants as cues to set membership (Wynn, Bloom, & Chiang, 2002; see also Barner, Wood, Hauser, & Carey, 2008, for similar evidence from non-human primates). Recent studies by Feigenson and colleagues suggest that other perceptual cues, such as color, shape, and the spatial segregation of objects may also lead infants to treat objects as members of sets (Feigenson, under review).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Does the conceptual distinction between singular and plural sets depend on language?

Ogura

Barner

et al. 2009

Developmental Psychology

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Previous studies indicate that English-learning children acquire the distinction between singular and plural nouns between 22-and 24-months. Also, their use of the distinction is correlated with the capacity to distinguish non-linguistically between singular and plural sets in a manual search paradigm (Barner et al., 2007). Three experiments explored the causal relation between these two capacities. Relative to English, Japanese and Mandarin have impoverished singular-plural marking. Using the manual search task, Experiment 1 found that by around 22-months, Japanese children also distinguish between singular and plural sets. Experiments 2 and 3 extended this finding to Mandarin-learning toddlers. Twenty-to 24-month-old Mandarin-learners did not yet comprehend Mandarin singular-plural marking (i.e., yige vs. yixie, or -men), yet they did distinguish between singular and plural sets in manual search. These experiments suggest that knowledge of singular-plural morphology is not necessary for deploying the non-linguistic distinction between singular and plural sets.

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“…In the above studies, the individuals move independently of each other, encouraging the infants to deploy parallel individuation. If sets of objects move as coherent wholes (e.g., glued to a platform, such that the items move together), young infants and rhesus macaques distinguish singletons from sets of more than one and fail to distinguish among plural sets of different numerosities, at least for small sets (e.g., 2, 3, 4, and 5; Barner, Wood, Hauser & Carey, 2008; Barner, Thalwitz, Wood & Carey, unpublished data). Again, we do not know why monkeys and infants do not draw on analog magnitudes on these tasks, but the data indicated that they do not, whereas their pattern of behavior reflects a categorical distinction between singletons, on the on hand, and pluralities, on the other.…”

Section: A Third Innate System Of Representation With Numerical Contementioning

confidence: 99%

Where Our Number Concepts Come From

Carey

2009

Journal of Philosophy

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Like most cognitive scientists, I take concepts to be mental symbols. Mental symbols are not all concepts, as there are also sensory representations, motor representations, and perceptual representations. From the perspective of cognitive science, a theory of concepts must specify their format, what computations they enter into, what determines their content, and how they differ from other types of mental symbols. In a recent book (Carey, in press) I present case studies of the acquisition of several important domains of conceptual representations, arguing that the details of the acquisition process adjudicate among rival theories of concepts within cognitive science. The case studies bear on the existence and nature of innate concepts, and on the existence and nature of discontinuities in development. Human conceptual development involves the construction of representational resources that go beyond those from which they are built in theoretically interesting ways. As Fodor (1975Fodor ( , 1980 has forcefully argued, characterizing these discontinuities and explaining how they are possible is a formidable challenge to cognitive science. Meeting this challenge informs our theories of the human conceptual system.Here I illustrate the lessons I draw from these case studies by touching on one of them: accounting for the origin of concepts of natural number. Explaining the human capacity for representing natural numbers has been a project in philosophy for centuries (e.g., Mill, 1874) and in psychology since its emergence as a scientific discipline during the past century (e.g., Piaget, 1952). As natural number is the backbone of all of arithmetic, an understanding how representations of natural number arise provides a good start on a theory of the human capacity for mathematics.Accounting for the origin of any conceptual requires specifying the innate building blocks from which the representations are built, and specifying the learning mechanisms that accomplish the feat. Two distinct research programs should be, but often are not, distinguished. In one, the logical program, the building blocks are conceived of as logically necessary prerequisites for the capacity in question. In the case of natural number representations these might include the capacity for carrying out recursive computations, the capacity to represent sets, and various logical capacities, such as those captured in second order predicate calculus. Sometimes arguments within the logical program seek to specify some necessary computational ability that other animals lack (e.g., see Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch's, 2002, proposal that non-humans lack the capacity for recursion) that might explain why only humans have the target conceptual ability. A full account of the building blocks for some representational capacity within the logical program must include all of the necessary ones. A second research program, the ontogenetic program, conceives of the building blocks as specific representational systems out of which the target representational capacity is ...

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Evidence for a non-linguistic distinction between singular and plural sets in rhesus monkeys

Cited by 84 publications

References 39 publications

Math in actions: Actor mode reveals the true arithmetic abilities of French-speaking 2-year-olds in a magic task

Math in actions: Actor mode reveals the true arithmetic abilities of French-speaking 2-year-olds in a magic task

Does the conceptual distinction between singular and plural sets depend on language?

Where Our Number Concepts Come From

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