Is Approximate Number Precision a Stable Predictor

Previous research shows that children's ability to estimate numbers of items using their Approximate Number System (ANS) predicts later math ability. To more closely examine the predictive role of early ANS acuity on later abilities, we assessed the ANS acuity, math ability, and expressive vocabulary of preschoolers twice, six months apart. We also administered attention and memory span tasks to ask whether the previously reported association between ANS acuity and math ability is ANS-specific or attributable to domain-general cognitive skills. We found that early ANS acuity predicted math ability six months later, even when controlling for individual differences in age, expressive vocabulary, and math ability at the initial testing. In addition, ANS acuity was a unique concurrent predictor of math ability above and beyond expressive vocabulary, attention, and memory span. These findings of a predictive relationship between early ANS acuity and later math ability add to the growing evidence for the importance of early numerical estimation skills

Is Approximate Number Precision a Stable Predictor

Previous research shows that children's ability to estimate numbers of items using their Approximate Number System (ANS) predicts later math ability. To more closely examine the predictive role of early ANS acuity on later abilities, we assessed the ANS acuity, math ability, and expressive vocabulary of preschoolers twice, six months apart. We also administered attention and memory span tasks to ask whether the previously reported association between ANS acuity and math ability is ANS-specific or attributable to domain-general cognitive skills. We found that early ANS acuity predicted math ability six months later, even when controlling for individual differences in age, expressive vocabulary, and math ability at the initial testing. In addition, ANS acuity was a unique concurrent predictor of math ability above and beyond expressive vocabulary, attention, and memory span. These findings of a predictive relationship between early ANS acuity and later math ability add to the growing evidence for the importance of early numerical estimation skills

Preschoolers' Precision of the Approximate Number System Predicts Later School Mathematics Performance

The Approximate Number System (ANS) is a primitive mental system of nonverbal representations that supports an intuitive sense of number in human adults, children, infants, and other animal species. The numerical approximations produced by the ANS are characteristically imprecise and, in humans, this precision gradually improves from infancy to adulthood. Throughout development, wide ranging individual differences in ANS precision are evident within age groups. These individual differences have been linked to formal mathematics outcomes, based on concurrent, retrospective, or short-term longitudinal correlations observed during the school age years. However, it remains unknown whether this approximate number sense actually serves as a foundation for these school mathematics abilities. Here we show that ANS precision measured at preschool, prior to formal instruction in mathematics, selectively predicts performance on school mathematics at 6 years of age. In contrast, ANS precision does not predict non-numerical cognitive abilities. To our knowledge, these results provide the first evidence for early ANS precision, measured before the onset of formal education, predicting later mathematical abilities

The Representations Underlying Infants' Choice of More: Object Files versus Analog Magnitudes

A new choice task was used to explore infants' spontaneous representations of more and less. Ten- and 12-month-old infants saw crackers placed sequentially into two containers, then were allowed to crawl and obtain the crackers from the container they chose. Infants chose the larger quantity with comparisons of 1 versus 2 and 2 versus 3, but failed with comparisons of 3 versus 4, 2 versus 4, and 3 versus 6. Success with visible arrays ruled out a motivational explanation for failure in the occluded 3-versus-6 condition. Control tasks ruled out the possibility that presentation duration guided choice, and showed that presentation complexity was not responsible for the failure with larger numbers. When crackers were different sizes, total surface area or volume determined choice. The infants' pattern of success and failure supports the hypothesis that they relied on object-file representations, comparing mental models via total volume or surface area rather than via one-to-one correspondence between object files

Is Empiricism Innate? Preference for Nurture over Nature in People’s Beliefs about the Origins of Human Knowledge

The origins of human knowledge are an enduring puzzle: what parts of what we know require learning, and what emerges regardless of experience? Despite nature-nurture defining debate for millennia and inspiring much contemporary research in psychology and neuroscience, it remains unknown whether people share intuitive, pre-scientific theories about the answer. Here in a series of experiments with 1188 participants, we find that people explain fundamental perceptual and cognitive abilities by appeal to learning and instruction, rather than genes or innateness. U.S. adults, adults from a culture with a belief in reincarnation, young children, and professional scientists-- including psychologists and neuroscientists, all believed these basic abilities to emerge significantly later than they actually do, and ascribed them to nurture rather than nature. These findings suggest that, regardless of age, culture, and education, people share an intuitive empiricist theory about the human mind

Stahl & Feigenson (2015)

Looking time, learning, and exploration data from infants in Experiments 1-4

Tracking Individuals Via Object-Files: Evidence From Infants' Manual Search

In two experiments, a manual search task explored 12- to 14-month-old infants' representations of small sets of objects. In this paradigm, patterns of searching revealed the number of objects infants represented as hidden in an opaque box. In Experiment 1, we obtained the set-size signature of object-file representations: infants succeeded at representing precisely 1, precisely 2, and precisely 3 objects in the box, but failed at representing 4 (or even that 4 is greater than 2). In Experiment 2, we showed that infants' expectations about the contents of the box were based on number of individual objects, and not on a continuous property such as total object volume. These findings support the hypothesis that infants maintained representations of individuals, that object-files were the underlying means of representing these individuals, and that object-file models can be compared via one-to-one correspondence to establish numerical equivalence

“Yay! Yuck!” Toddlers use incongruent emotions to reason about hidden objects

Young children show sensitivity to others’ emotions, discriminating between facial expressions and using them to help guide their behavior. Beyond providing information about how others are feeling, emotional expressions also can support inferences about the non-social world. Here, in four experiments, we investigated 18- to 28-month-olds’ ability to reason about physical objects using others’ emotional responses. We found that 24- to 26-month-old children successfully used an agent’s incongruent emotional responses (“Yay! Yuck!”) to infer that multiple hidden objects must be hidden in a box (Experiment 1). When two different agents produced these incongruent emotional responses, children did not infer the presence of multiple objects (Experiment 2), implicating early recognition that different people can have different emotions towards the same entity. Younger, 20-month-old children failed to use incongruent emotional responses to make inferences about hidden objects (Experiment 3), although they succeeded at using contrasting words (“A blick! A fep!”) in an otherwise identical task (Experiment 4). These results show that by 2 years of age, children can use the emotional responses produced by others around them to reason about hidden objects