Although infants and animals respond to the approximate number of elements in visual, auditory, and tactile arrays, only human children and adults have been shown to possess abstract numerical representations that apply to entities of all kinds (e.g., 7 samurai, seas, or sins). Do abstract numerical concepts depend on language or culture, or do they form a part of humans' innate, core knowledge? Here we show that newborn infants spontaneously associate stationary, visual-spatial arrays of 4 -18 objects with auditory sequences of events on the basis of number. Their performance provides evidence for abstract numerical representations at the start of postnatal experience.development ͉ numerical cognition ͉ cognitive A re humans endowed with abstract representations of the surrounding world? In the domain of number, animals and preverbal infants have been shown to react to the cardinal values of sets presented in a variety of different stimulus formats, and this core number sense is thought to guide learning of numeric symbols and arithmetic in human children and adults (1-5). For example, by the age of 4.5 to 6 months, infants are able to discriminate between numbers differing in a 1:2 ratio (e.g., 16 vs. 32, 8 vs. 16, 4 vs. 8), when presented with arrays of dots (6, 7), sequences of sounds (8), or sequences of actions (9). In each of these experiments, however, infants were tested with only 1 type of stimulus, raising the question of the level of abstraction of these numeric representations.From the early 1980s to present, several investigations have tested for numeric cross-modal matching in infants with mixed results. Although infants initially were reported to look longer at a set of objects that matched a sequence of sounds played simultaneously (10, 11), subsequent experiments yielded either no such preference (12) or a reversed preference (13). Failures to match sounds and objects on the basis of number have been documented until 3-4 years of age, eventually resolving as children start to master verbal counting (14). By using more natural stimuli, later research showed unequivocally that infants and animals could detect the numerical correspondence between 2 or 3 items in different modalities (15)(16)(17)(18). In all of these studies, however, matching was elicited either by drawing on cross-modal correspondences that were familiar [faces and voices (15, 16) or objects with similar features presented across the visual and tactile modalities (18)], or by presenting a familiarization phase in which events in different modalities occurred in synchrony (17). In these situations, cross-modal matching might be achieved by calling on amodal representations of objects rather than amodal representations of abstract, cardinal values. For example, presentation of a voice may elicit an image of a face; when 3 distinct voices are played, therefore, infants may represent 3 correspondingly distinct faces that then can be quantified and compared to a matching or nonmatching visual stimulus. Indeed, the numbers tested in t...

The present research investigates newborn infants' perceptions of the shape and texture of objects through studies of the bi-directionality of cross-modal transfer between vision and touch. Using an intersensory procedure, four experiments were performed in newborns to study their ability to transfer shape and texture information from vision to touch and from touch to vision. The results showed that cross-modal transfer of shape is not bi-directional at birth. Newborns visually recognized a shape previously held but they failed to tactually recognize a shape previously seen. In contrast, a bi-directional cross-modal transfer of texture was observed. Taken together, the results suggest that newborn infants, like older children and adults, gather information differently in the visual and tactile modes, for different object properties. The findings provide evidence for continuity in the development of mechanisms for perceiving object properties.

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