Infants are capable of discriminating, representing, and remembering particular small numbers of items. A perceptual enumeration process called subitizing, present in 2-year-olds, probably underlies this capacity. This finding indicates that some number capacity is present before the onset of verbal counting, and it suggests that verbal counting may have precursors present during infancy.
Infants prefer to look at an array of objects that corresponds in number to a sequence of sounds. In doing so, infants disregard the modality (visual or auditory) and type (object or event) of items presented. This finding indicates that infants possess a mechanism that enables them to obtain information about number.
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