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ERIC Number: EJ1006634
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2013-Jan
Pages: 9
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0022-0965
EISSN: N/A
Infants Use Different Mechanisms to Make Small and Large Number Ordinal Judgments
vanMarle, Kristy
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, v114 n1 p102-110 Jan 2013
Previous research has shown indirectly that infants may use two different mechanisms-an object tracking system and an analog magnitude mechanism--to represent small (less than 4) and large (greater than or equal to 4) numbers of objects, respectively. The current study directly tested this hypothesis in an ordinal choice task by presenting 10- to 12-month-olds with a choice between different numbers of hidden food items. Infants reliably chose the larger amount when choosing between two exclusively small (1 vs. 2) or large (4 vs. 8) sets, but they performed at chance when one set was small and the other was large (2 vs. 4) even when the ratio between the sets was very favorable (2 vs. 8). The current findings support the two-mechanism hypothesis and, furthermore, suggest that the representations from the object tracking system and the analog magnitude mechanism are incommensurable. (Contains 1 figure.)
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Publication Type: 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