Representations of Abstract Quantities

描述（由申请人提供）：量化世界的能力对于最基本的学习至关重要。负责这种能力的认知系统，即模拟量1，在许多临床人群中出现选择性受损（例如，PD和计算障碍），使对这个系统的理解成为临床心理学的中心问题。尽管非人类动物和人类婴儿都能辨别数量，但关于它们能力的性质和程度，还有很多东西需要了解。通过使用新范式对人类婴儿和大鼠进行比较研究，我们计划研究这些表征的精确性、模态独立性和有序性。提出这样的问题：会说话前的婴儿是否与非人类动物共享这种表示时间、数字和大小的数量系统？这些幅度是否依赖于刺激（从而受感知约束）？这些非语言人群中的数量歧视是否基于一个值大于另一个值的固有知识？在解决这些问题时，我希望能提供对这些非语言数量表征的更好理解，从而导致早期临床行为筛查的发展。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The ability to quantify the world is essential for the most basic learning. The cognitive system responsible for this ability, the analog magnitude one, appears selectively impaired in a number of clinical populations (e.g., PD and Dyscalculia), making an understanding of this system a central issue in clinical psychology. Although both non-human animals and human infants are able to discriminate quantities, there is still much to learn about the nature and extent of their competence. Through comparative investigations of human infants and rats using novel paradigms, we plan to examine the precision, modality-independence, and ordinal nature of these representations. Asking questions such as: Do preverbal infants share with non-human animals this magnitude system for representations of time, number, and size? Are these magnitudes stimulus-dependent (and thus perceptually-bound)? Are quantity discriminations in these nonverbal populations based upon inherent knowledge that one value is greater than the other? In addressing such issues, I hope to provide a greater understanding of these nonverbal quantity representations, thus leading to the development of earlier clinical behavioral screens.