The multisensory representation of number in infancy.

ABSTRACT: Human infants can discriminate visual and auditory stimuli solely on the basis of number, suggesting a developmental foundation for the nonverbal number representations of adult humans. Recent studies suggest that these language-independent number representations are multisensory in both adult humans and nonhuman animals. Surprisingly, however, previous studies have yielded mixed evidence concerning whether nonverbal numerical representations independent of sensory modality are present early in human development. In this article, we use a paradigm that avoids stimulus confounds present in previous studies of cross-modal numerical mapping in infants. We show that 7-month-old infants preferentially attend to visual displays of adult humans that numerically match the number of adult humans th

SUBMITTER: Jordan KE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1413880 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature