Representation of number in infancy

描述(由申请人提供)：这项建议的总体目标是通过研究成人人类数学思维在婴儿期的发展来更深入地了解它。一个主要的目标是测试共享系统假说，即婴儿依赖于类似于成人、幼儿和非人类动物所使用的数字的模拟量表示。这将通过四个系列的实验来完成。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依赖于所比较的数字的比率，而不是绝对值。第二个系列将测试婴儿是否优先考虑数字，而不是其他通常随数字变化的非数字刺激属性。第三个系列将测试婴儿是否理解数字之间的顺序关系，以及这种能力是如何发展的。最后一个系列将探索婴儿眼球运动在数字判断中的作用。这项研究计划是首席研究员研究数字认知的演变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；通过促进对正常认知发展的理解，这最终将为理解异常人群的认知发展提供背景。此外，这项研究将有助于更全面地了解儿童数字能力的发展，因此可能对儿童的小学数学等主题的教学具有重要意义。

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.