The psychophysics of number, time, and space

在许多方面，人类的思维与其他动物的思维非常相似。例如，考虑我们对时间的感知：就像我们可以估计大约多长时间前我们购买了一罐旧牛奶一样，西方灌木鸟可以将他们的食物储存起来，然后判断已经过了多长时间，以及食物是否可能变质。然而，与其他动物不同的是，人类还可以使用语言来精确和象征性地推理和交流世界，允许我们通过时钟、日历和牛奶保质期来离散地表示时间。具体说明我们与其他动物共享的核心认知能力如何与语言交互，以及这种交互如何指导人类特有能力的发展，这是我们对人类思维作为一个独特的生物系统的理解的根本挑战。 这项奖励侧重于我们对数字、时间和空间的直观感觉与涉及这些数量的词语(例如，“八”、“早晨”和“公里”)之间的关系。它提出，学习将我们的直觉数量感觉与语言联系起来的主要挑战来自于我们知觉表征的噪音。因此，例如，如果你要口头估计罐子里的弹珠数量，你对数字的嘈杂感知将同时与“50”、“80”、“90”以及介于两者之间的所有东西保持一致。因此，儿童在数量表征和语言之间出现的接口应该会抓住将嘈杂的模拟表征转化为离散的模拟表征这一挑战。这一预测在三个实验中得到了验证，该实验预测：(1)如果我们通过实验缓解只为儿童选择一个单词的问题，儿童将显著更快地显示出将他们对数字、时间和空间的直觉与语言联系起来的能力；(2)这个接口的改进将独立发生在儿童的嘈杂数量表征和语言能力的发展中，反映出他们将模拟表征减少到离散表征的能力的提高；(3)这个接口的个体差异将预测儿童最早的高阶算术和几何能力：接口越精确，早期的数学能力就越好。 这项研究计划具有广泛的影响。首先，它将提供并测试一个具体的理论，解释儿童的直觉数量表征--那些与其他非人类动物分享的那些--如何与语言联系起来。其次，它将测试一种机制，通过这种机制，儿童将不同的认知系统连接起来，创造出人类特有的能力和表征。最终，这项研究计划旨在证明，语言是一种连接不同核心认知表征的工具，允许人类大脑概念化和思考以前从来没有过的计算和能力，例如负数、时间旅行和无限的空间。

In many ways, human minds closely resemble those of other animals. Consider, for example, our perception of time: much like we can estimate approximately how long ago we purchased an old jug of milk, Western Scrub-Jays can cache their food and later judge how much time has passed and whether the food is likely to have spoiled. Unlike other animals, however, humans can also use language to reason and communicate about the world precisely and symbolically, allowing us to represent time discretely through clocks, calendars, and milk expiration dates. Specifying how the core cognitive abilities we share with other animals interface with language, and how this interface guides the development of human-specific abilities, is a fundamental challenge to our understanding of the human mind as a unique biological system. This grant focuses on the relationship between our intuitive sense of number, time, and space, and words that refer to these quantities (e.g., “eight”, “mornings”, and “kilometers”). It proposes that the central challenge in learning to interface our intuitive sense of quantity with language comes from the noise of our perceptual representations. Thus, for example, if you were to verbally estimate the number of marbles in a jar, your noisy perception of number will simultaneously be consistent with “fifty”, “eighty”, “ninety”, and everything in-between. Therefore, children’s emerging interface between quantity representations and language should capture this challenge of converting noisy analog representations into discrete ones. This prediction is tested in three experiments, predicting that: (1) children will show the ability to link their intuitive sense of number, time, and space to language significantly sooner if we experimentally alleviate the problem of selecting just a single word for them; (2) the refinement of this interface will occur independently children’s developing noisy quantity representations and language abilities, reflecting their improving ability to reduce analog representations to discrete ones; and (3) individual differences in this interface will predict children’s earliest higher-order arithmetic and geometry abilities: the more precise the interface, the better early math abilities. This research program has broad implications. First, it will provide and test a specific theory explaining how children’s intuitive quantity representations - those shared with other non-human animals - connect with language. Second, it will test a mechanism by which children connect disparate cognitive systems to create human-specific abilities and representations. Ultimately, this research program aims to show that language is a tool that bridges disparate core cognitive representations, allowing human minds to conceptualize and think about computations and abilities they never could before, such as negative numbers, time travel, and the infinity of space.