Infants Make Quantity Discriminations for Substances

Infants can track small groups of solid objects, and infants can respond when these quantities change. But earlier work is equivocal about whether infants can track continuous substances, such as piles of sand. Experiment 1 (N = 88) used a habituation paradigm to show infants can register changes in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Child development Vol. 83; no. 2; pp. 554 - 567
Main Authors:	Hespos, Susan J., Dora, Begum, Rips, Lance J., Christie, Stella
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01-03-2012 Wiley-Blackwell
Subjects:	Age Factors Age groups Attention Babies Biological and medical sciences Child Development Cognition Concept Formation Cues Developmental psychology Discrimination Discrimination Learning EMPIRICAL ARTICLES Evidence Experimentation Experiments Eye Movements Female Ferries Fixation, Ocular Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology Gender Differences Gender differentiation Gender discrimination Habituation Habituation, Psychophysiologic Humans Identification Infancy Infant Infant Behavior Infants Liquids Male Motion Perception Newborn. Infant Object Pattern Recognition, Visual Psychology Psychology, Child Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry Psychology. Psychophysiology Registers Science Education Science Experiments Sex Factors Size Perception Small groups Substances Surface areas Human Discrimination Infant Quantity Cognition Cognitive development Experimental study
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Summary:	Infants can track small groups of solid objects, and infants can respond when these quantities change. But earlier work is equivocal about whether infants can track continuous substances, such as piles of sand. Experiment 1 (N = 88) used a habituation paradigm to show infants can register changes in the size of piles of sand that they see poured from a container when there is a 1-to-4 ratio. Experiment 2 (N = 82) tested whether infants could discriminate a 1-to-2 ratio. The results demonstrate that females could discriminate the difference but males could not. These findings constitute the youngest evidence of successful quantity discriminations for a noncohesive substance and begin to characterize the nature of the representation for noncohesive entities.
Bibliography:	istex:3B027907451C7F68E570B03D0D4601DABC2A2728 ArticleID:CDEV1703 ark:/67375/WNG-JBKT19R9-T We thank Kaitlin Ainsworth, Alissa Ferry, and Anna Lane for helpful suggestions and help with data collection. We are indebted to the parents who agreed to have their infants participate in the research and the undergraduate students who helped collect the data. This research was supported in part by a grant from NSF 0718513 to S.J.H. and IES Grant R305A080341 to L.J.R. ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 ObjectType-Article-2 ObjectType-Feature-1
ISSN:	0009-3920 1467-8624
DOI:	10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01703.x