Intersensory redundancy accelerates preverbal numerical competence

Jordan, Kerry; Suanda, Sumarga H.; Brannon, Elizabeth M.

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2007.12.001

Cited by 114 publications

(80 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Thus, rather than number being detected as a last resort, it seems more likely that infants simultaneously track the number of discrete objects in a set and the non-numerical characteristics of those objects. Consistent with this interpretation, combining auditory and visual cues to number improves the Weber-Fechner ratio that infants can discriminate over that which they can discriminate on the basis of visual cues alone (Jordan, Suanda, & Brannon, 2008). …”

supporting

confidence: 60%

Development of Quantitative Thinking

Opfer

Siegler

2012

The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning

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For understanding development of quantitative thinking, the distinction between non-symbolic and symbolic thinking is fundamental. Non-symbolic quantitative thinking is present in early infancy, culturally universal, and similar across species. These similarities include the ability to represent and compare numerosities, the representations being noisy and increasing logarithmically with actual quantity, and the neural correlates of number representation being distributed in homologous regions of fronto-parietal cortex. Symbolic quantitative thinking, in contrast, emerged recently in human history, differs dramatically across cultural groups, and develops over many years. As young children gain experience with symbols in a given numeric range and associate them with non-verbal quantities in that range, they initially map them to a logarithmically-compressed mental number line and later to a linear form. This logarithmic-to-linear shift expands children's quantitative skills profoundly, including ability to estimate positions of numbers on number lines, to estimate measurements of continuous and discrete quantities, to categorize numbers by size, to remember numbers, and to estimate and learn answers to arithmetic problems. Thus, while non-symbolic quantitative thinking is important and foundational for symbolic numerical capabilities, the capacity to represent symbolic quantities offers crucial cognitive advantages.Keywords: Numerical cognition; number representation; mathematical thinking; symbols; cognitive development Quantitative thinking is central to human life. Whether the situation involves a child recalling which blocks provided her with the most candies on previous Halloweens, a Londoner telling the time by counting the tolls of Big Ben, or a candidate using polls to predict results of an upcoming election, quantitative thinking is important for learning from the past, monitoring the present, and planning for the future.Quantitative thinking plays an important role in the lives of other animals as well.To project the outcome of a future fight, prides of lionesses compare their pride-number to the number of distinct roars they hear in rival packs (McComb et al., 1994). Similarly, Development of Quantitative Thinking 2 to learn optimal foraging locations, animals in the wild encode the relative number of food items they have found previously in various locations (Davis, 1993).The existence of such quantitative abilities makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Being deprived of a sense of how many would deprive an animal of any rationality in its judgments and decision-making. Rational choices among alternative strategies and courses of action would be rendered impossible.Given the importance of quantitative thinking, it is unsurprising that representations of quantity are a universal property of human cognition. Quantitative representations are present from early infancy Feigenson, Dehaene, & Spelke, 2004), and share striking similarities across human cultures that provide radically different cultu...

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supporting

confidence: 60%

Development of Quantitative Thinking

Opfer

Siegler

2012

The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning

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“…Research on infant numerical cognition has consistently shown that providing infants with multiple cues boosts their sensitivity to numerical differences (Jordan, Suanda, & Brannon, 2008) as well as their ability to extract ordinal numerical relations (Suanda, Tompson, & Brannon, 2008). Therefore, in Experiment 3 we tested a new group of 4-month-old infants using a new set of test stimuli, in which the magnitude difference between the with -OM and the against-OM sequences was provided not only by number, but also by cumulative surface area, as the two cues covaried one with the other between the sequences (the habituation stimuli for Experiment 3 remained identical to those in Experiment 2).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Operational momentum during ordering operations for size and number in 4-month-old infants

et al. 2017

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An Operational Momentum (OM) effect is shown by 9-month-old infants during non-symbolic arithmetic, whereby they overestimate the outcomes to addition problems, and underestimate the outcomes to subtraction problems. Recent evidence has shown that this effect extends to ordering operations for size-based sequences in 12-month-olds. Here we provide evidence that OM occurs for ordering operations involving numerical sequences containing multiple quantity cues, but not size-based sequences, already at 4 months of age. Infants were tested in an ordinal task in which they detected and represented increasing or decreasing variations in physical and/or numerical size, and then responded to ordinal sequences that exhibited greater or lesser sizes/numerosities, thus following or violating the OM generated during habituation. Results showed that OM was absent during size ordering (Experiment 1), but was present when infants ordered arrays of discrete elements varying on numerical and non-numerical dimensions, if both number and continuous magnitudes were available cues to discriminate between with-OM and against-OM sequences during test trials (Experiments 2 vs. 3). The presence of momentum for ordering number only when provided with multiple cues of magnitude changes suggests that OM is a complex phenomenon that blends multiple representations of magnitude early in infancy.

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“…In the current experiment it was predicted, based on neuroimaging and ERP work with human adults (Alpert et al, 2008;Beauchamp et al, 2004;Calvert, 2001;Calvert et al, 2001;Kayser et al, 2007), single cell recordings in animals (see Stein, Meredith, & Wallace, 1994 for a review), and behavioral work with infants Jordan, Suanda, & Brannon, 2008), that the synchronous presentation of bimodal (auditoryvisual) stimulation would evoke an amplified auditory response compared to unimodal auditory stimulation in infants. A group of adults was also included to allow for a comparison of the infant ERP response to that of the mature ERP in response to the same stimuli.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual stimulation enhances auditory processing in 3‐month‐old infants and adults

Hyde

Jones

Porter

et al. 2009

Developmental Psychobiology

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Behavioral work demonstrates human infants are sensitive to a host of intersensory properties and this sensitivity promotes early learning and memory. However, little is known regarding the neural basis of this ability in infants. Using event-related potentials (ERPs) with infants and adults, we show that during passive viewing auditory evoked brain responses are increased with the presence of simultaneous visual stimulation. Results converge with previous adult neuroimaging studies, single-cell recordings in nonhuman animals, and behavioral studies with human infants to provide evidence for an elevated status of multisensory stimulation in infancy. Furthermore, these results may provide a neural marker of multisensory audio-visual processing in infants that can be used to test developmental theories of how information is integrated across the senses to form a unitary perception of the world.

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Intersensory redundancy accelerates preverbal numerical competence

Cited by 114 publications

References 27 publications

Development of Quantitative Thinking

Development of Quantitative Thinking

Operational momentum during ordering operations for size and number in 4-month-old infants

Visual stimulation enhances auditory processing in 3‐month‐old infants and adults

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