Four-month-old infants extract ordinal information in number-based and size-based visual sequences, provided that magnitude changes involve increasing relations. Here the ontogenetic origins of ordinal processing were investigated between 2018 and 2022 by testing newborns' discrimination of reversal in numerosity (Experiment 1, N = 22 White, 11…

In quantity discrimination tasks, adults, infants and animals have been sometimes observed to process number only after all continuous variables, such as area or density, have been controlled for. This has been taken as evidence that processing number may be more cognitively demanding than processing continuous variables. We tested this hypothesis…

This study investigates the ability of 6-month-old infants to attend to the continuous properties of a set of discrete entities. Infants were habituated to dot arrays that were constant in cumulative surface area yet varied in number for small (less than 4) or large (greater than 3) sets. Results revealed that infants detected a 4-fold (but not…

Behavioral studies show that infants are capable of discriminating the number of objects or events in their environment, while also suggesting that number discrimination in infancy may be ratio-dependent. However, due to limitations of the dependent measures used with infant behavioral studies, the evidence for ratio dependence falls short of the…

Time perception is important for many aspects of human behavior, and a large literature documents that adults represent intervals and that their ability to discriminate temporal intervals is ratio dependent. Here we replicate a recent study by vanMarle and Wynn (2006 ) that used the visual habituation paradigm and demonstrated that temporal…

Two experiments examined 6-month-olds' ability to discriminate between visual displays of various number of dots varying in size and position, and with controls for other extraneous variables. Findings indicated that infants could discriminate between large sets on the basis of numerosity if they differed by a large ratio (8 versus 16, but not 8…

Compared two teaching strategies, delayed-prompting and fading, for teaching the most easily confused letters and numbers to preschoolers (N=39). The results indicated that children who received discrimination training using delayed prompting made fewer errors on the posttests for the letters and numbers mastered than did children taught via…

This brief report attempts to resolve the claim that infants preferentially attend to continuous variables over number [e.g. Psychol. Sci. 10 (1999) 408; Cognit. Psychol.44 (2002) 33] with the finding that when continuous variables are controlled, infants as young as 6-months of age discriminate large numerical values [e.g. Psychol. Sci. 14 (2003)…

The relationships among the perception, representation, and construction of series are examined within a model of the acquisition of seriation abilities. The model is then related to two experiments with three-, four- and five-year-olds. The key feature of the model is the delineation of parallels among developmental changes in three arenas:…

Illustrated instructions are provided for constructing 32 teaching aids. To be used with blind and visually limited children, the aids are designed to assist the child in exploration, discrimination, and recognition; spatial orientation and association of tactual symbology; likenesses and differences in tactual group symbols; word association and…