The psychophysics of number, time, and space

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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.