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ERIC Number: EJ724239
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2005-Oct
Pages: 19
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0010-0277
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
On the Limits of Infants' Quantification of Small Object Arrays
Feigenson, Lisa; Carey, Susan
Cognition, v97 n3 p295-313 Oct 2005
Recent work suggests that infants rely on mechanisms of object-based attention and short-term memory to represent small numbers of objects. Such work shows that infants discriminate arrays containing 1, 2, or 3 objects, but fail with arrays greater than 3 [Feigenson, L., & Carey, S. (2003). Tracking individuals via object-files: Evidence from infants' manual search. "Developmental Science," 6, 568-584; Feigenson, L., Carey, S., & Hauser, M. (2002). The representations underlying infants' choice of more: Object files versus analog magnitudes. "Psychological Science," 13(2), 150-156]. However, little is known about how infants represent arrays exceeding the 3-item limit of parallel representation. We explored possible formats by which infants might represent a 4-object array. Experiment 1 used a manual search paradigm to show that infants successfully discriminated between arrays of 1 vs. 2, 2 vs. 3, and 1 vs. 3 objects. However, infants failed to discriminate 1 vs. 4 despite the highly discriminable ratio, providing the strongest evidence to date for object-file representations underlying performance in this task. Experiment 2 replicated this dramatic failure to discriminate 1 from 4 in a second paradigm, a cracker choice task. We then showed that infants in the choice task succeeded at choosing the larger quantity with 0 vs. 4 crackers and with 1 small vs. 4 large crackers. These results suggest that while infants failed to represent 4 as "exactly 4", "approximately 4", "3", or as even as "a plurality", they did represent information about the array, including the existence of a cracker or cracker-material and the size of the individual objects in the array.
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Publication Type: Information Analyses; Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A