Kelly S. Mix

Numerical Abstraction in Infants: Another Look.

This article examines an important finding from the literature on infant numerical competence. The finding, reported by P. Starkey, E. S. Spelke, and R. Gelman (1990), was that infants looked longer toward a visual display that was equal in number to an auditory set. In Experiment 1, when the procedures described by P. Starkey et al. were followed and duration was held constant across auditory sequences that varied in number, infants looked longer toward the display that was not numerically equivalent to the auditory set. In Experiment 2, when the rate and duration of the auditory sequences were varied randomly within infants, no significant preference for either the equivalent or nonequivalent visual display was shown. These results raise questions about P. Starkey et al.s claims that infants can represent the numerosity of sets in different modalities and then perform one-one correspondence computations over them.

The construction of number concepts

Abstract This paper describes the development of number concepts from infancy to early childhood. The results of a diary study on a child’s one-to-one correspondence activities from 12 to 38 months of age are presented. The diary study suggested that social activities, such as distributing objects to people, play a greater role in early numerical development than conservation-like activities, such as matching object sets. There also was evidence that early number concepts are highly context-dependent. Specifically, although this child represented and matched equivalent sets in a few highly constrained contexts, he could not do so in others. An alternative to the competence–performance distinction is developed for explaining such cross-task variability.

Space and Math Wave One and Wave Two v.1

IES Grant #R305A120416 to Mix and Levine; NSF Grants #SBE-1041707 and #SBE-0541957 to Levine.