Representation of number in infancy

描述（由申请人提供）：本提案的总体目标是通过研究婴儿期人类数学思维的发展来更深入地了解成年人的数学思维。一个主要的目标是测试共享系统假设，即婴儿依赖于类似于成人、幼儿和非人类动物使用的数字的模拟量级表示。这将在四个系列的实验中完成。第一个系列将使用三种行为方法来测试婴儿的数字辨别是否取决于所比较数字的比例，而不是绝对值。第二个系列将测试婴儿是否优先关注数字而不是其他非数字刺激属性，这些属性通常与数字相关。第三个系列将测试婴儿是否欣赏数字之间的顺序关系以及这种能力是如何发展的。最后一个系列将探讨婴儿的眼球运动在数字判断中的作用。该研究计划是首席研究员研究数字认知的进化和发展的长期目标的一部分。拟议的研究广泛涉及健康问题；通过推进对正常认知发展的理解，这将最终为理解异常人群的认知发展提供一个背景。此外，这项研究将有助于更全面地了解数字能力的发展，因此可能对儿童小学数学等教学主题具有重要意义。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The broad goal of this proposal is to gain a deeper understanding of the adult human mathematical mind by studying its development in infancy. A major goal is to test the shared systems hypothesis that infants rely on analog magnitude representations of number similar to those used by adults, young children, and non-human animals. This will be done in four series of experiments. The first series will use three behavioral methods to test whether infants' numerical discriminations are dependent on the ratio of the numerosities compared rather than the absolute values. The second series will test whether infants attend preferentially to number over other non-numerical stimulus attributes which often covary with number. The third series will test whether infants appreciate the ordinal relations between numerosities and how this ability develops. The final series will explore the role of infants' eye movements in numerical judgments. The research plan is part of the principal investigator's long-term goal of studying both the evolution and the development of numerical cognition. The research proposed broadly relates to health concerns; by advancing an understanding of normal cognitive development which will ultimately provide a context for understanding the cognitive development of abnormal populations. Furthermore this research will contribute to a fuller understanding of the development numerical abilities and may therefore have important implications for teaching topics such as elementary mathematics to children.