Presents evidence that human infants possess a mechanism for determining and representing small numbers of entities and procedures for operating on these representations to extract numerical relationships between them. Presents a model for this mechanism and discusses its relation to later numerical knowledge. Contains 42 references. (MKR)

Described is a study designed to extend a theoretical model of children's progression from a perceptual to an abstract concept of number. The implications of this research for the design of mathematics curricula are discussed. (CW)