The psychophysics of number, time, and space

数字、时间和空间的心理物理学

• 批准号: RGPIN-2016-03984
• 负责人: Odic, Darko
• 金额: $ 1.82万
• 依托单位: University of British Columbia
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2020-01-01 至 2021-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=708527
• 关键词: psychophysics; number; time; space

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.

在许多方面，人类的思维与其他动物非常相似。例如，我们对时间的感知：就像我们可以估计大约多久前我们买了一罐旧牛奶一样，西部灌丛鸦可以将它们的食物储存起来，然后判断已经过了多长时间，以及食物是否可能已经变质。然而，与其他动物不同的是，人类还可以使用语言来精确地和象征性地推理和交流世界，使我们能够通过时钟，日历和牛奶的有效期来离散地表示时间。我们与其他动物共享的核心认知能力如何与语言接口，以及这种接口如何指导人类特定能力的发展，是我们理解人类思维作为一个独特的生物系统的根本挑战。 这个补助金的重点是我们对数字，时间和空间的直观感觉之间的关系，以及指这些量的单词（例如，“八”、“早晨”和“公里”）。它提出，学习将我们的直觉数量感与语言相结合的核心挑战来自于我们感知表征的噪音。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一切保持一致。因此，儿童的数量表征和语言之间的新兴接口应抓住这一挑战，将嘈杂的模拟表征转化为离散的。这一预测在三个实验中得到了验证，预测：（1）如果我们实验性地减轻只为儿童选择一个单词的问题，儿童将更快地表现出将他们对数字、时间和空间的直觉与语言联系起来的能力;（2）该界面的细化将独立于儿童噪声数量表征和语言能力的发展而发生，反映了他们将模拟表征简化为离散表征的能力的提高;（3）这种界面的个体差异将预测儿童最早的高阶算术和几何能力：界面越精确，早期数学能力越好。 这项研究计划具有广泛的影响。首先，它将提供和测试一个特定的理论，解释儿童的直觉数量表征与其他非人类动物共享的-与语言连接。其次，它将测试一种机制，儿童通过这种机制将不同的认知系统联系起来，创造出人类特有的能力和表征。最终，这项研究计划旨在表明，语言是一种工具，它连接了不同的核心认知表征，使人类的头脑能够概念化和思考他们以前从未有过的计算和能力，例如负数，时间旅行和无限空间。