Spontaneous non-verbal counting in toddlers

Developmental Science
Francesco SellaMarco Zorzi

Abstract

A wealth of studies have investigated numerical abilities in infants and in children aged 3 or above, but research on pre-counting toddlers is sparse. Here we devised a novel version of an imitation task that was previously used to assess spontaneous focusing on numerosity (i.e. the predisposition to grasp numerical properties of the environment) to assess whether pre-counters would spontaneously deploy sequential (item-by-item) enumeration and whether this ability would rely on the object tracking system (OTS) or on the approximate number system (ANS). Two-and-a-half-year-olds watched the experimenter performing one-by-one insertion of 'food tokens' into an opaque animal puppet and then were asked to imitate the puppet-feeding behavior. The number of tokens varied between 1 and 6 and each numerosity was presented many times to obtain a distribution of responses during imitation. Many children demonstrated attention to the numerosity of the food tokens despite the lack of any explicit cueing to the number dimension. Most notably, the response distributions centered on the target numerosities and showed the classic variability signature that is attributed to the ANS. These results are consistent with previous studies on sequenti...Continue Reading

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Citations

Jul 19, 2015·Psychonomic Bulletin & Review·Stephen FerrignoJessica F Cantlon
Nov 15, 2017·The British Journal of Developmental Psychology·Joke TorbeynsLieven Verschaffel
Jan 3, 2018·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences·Marco Zorzi, Alberto Testolin
Jul 20, 2018·Psychological Research·Elvio BliniMarco Zorzi
Sep 20, 2020·Psychonomic Bulletin & Review·Alberto Testolin, James L McClelland
Jun 29, 2021·Cognition·Celestino CreatoreTrygve Solstad

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