Number discrimination in 10-month-old infants

Xu, Fei
Arriaga, Rosa I.

¹ University of British Columbia, Canada
² Harvard University, USA

^*Correspondence should be addressed to Fei Xu, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada (e-mail:[email protected]).

Received 4 July 2005; revised version received 29 November 2005

British Journal of Developmental Psychology 25(1):p 103-108, March 2007. | DOI: 10.1348/026151005X90704

Two experiments investigated developmental changes in large number discrimination with visual-spatial arrays. Previous studies found that 6-month-old infants were able to discriminate arrays that differ by a ratio of 1:2 but not 2:3. We found that by 10 months, infants were able to reliably discriminate 8 from 12 elements (2:3) but not 8 from 10 elements (4:5). Thus, number discrimination improves in precision during the first year, and these findings converge with studies using auditory stimuli.