Speed discrimination in 6- and 10-month-old infants follows Weber’s law

Möhring, Wenke; Libertus, Melissa E.; Bertin, Evelyn

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2011.11.002

Cited by 50 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Across multiple literatures, there is evidence for many other contents that rely on continuous representations similar to the ANS; these include representations of approximate area (Brannon, Lutz, & Cordes, 2006;Odic, Libertus, et al, 2013;Odic, Pietroski, Hunter, Lidz, & Halberda, 2013), length (Droit-Volet et al, 2008), time (Droit-Volet et al, 2008;Meck & Church, 1983;Walsh, 2003), speed (Möhring, Libertus, & Bertin, 2012), and many more (Cantlon et al, 2009;Dehaene & Brannon, 2011;Feigenson, 2007). Each of these is available prelinguistically and humans in many cultures eventually master an ability to map from these representations into discrete values and vice versa (e.g., ''the speed limit is 130 km/h'', ''these crayons are various shades of red'').…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s mappings between number words and the approximate number system

2015

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s mappings between number words and the approximate number system

2015

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“…Recently, young 3-year-olds have been shown to learn the meaning of the word more in context of both approximating number and approximating area, suggesting an underlying similarity between these two dimensions (Odic, Pietroski, Hunter, Lidz, & Halberda, 2012). Finally, in human infants, 6-month-olds have been shown to discriminate a ratio of 2.0 for the area of an Elmo face (Brannon, Lutz, & Cordes, 2006), and also to discriminate the same 2.0 ratio when comparing the number of elements in an array (Xu & Spelke, 2000), the duration of an auditory event (Brannon, Suanda, & Libertus, 2007; VanMarle & Wynn, 2006), and the speed of an object’s motion (Möhring, Libertus, & Bertin, 2012). However, not all quantity dimensions elicit the same acuity in 6-month-olds.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Developmental change in the acuity of approximate number and area representations.

Odic¹,

Libertus²,

Feigenson³

et al. 2013

Developmental Psychology

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From very early in life, humans can approximate the number and surface area of objects in a scene. The ability to discriminate between 2 approximate quantities, whether number or area, critically depends on the ratio between the quantities, with the most difficult ratio that a participant can reliably discriminate known as the Weber fraction. While developmental improvements in the Weber fraction have been demonstrated for number, the developmental trajectory of improvement in area discrimination remains unknown. Here we investigated whether the development of area discrimination parallels that of number discrimination. We tested forty 3- to 6-year-old children and adults in both a number and an area discrimination task in which participants selected the greater of 2 quantities across a range of ratios. We used formal psychophysical models to derive, for each participant and each age group, the Weber fraction for both number and area discrimination. We found that, like number acuity, area acuity steadily improves during childhood. However, we also found area acuity to be consistently higher than number acuity, suggesting a potential difference in the underlying mechanisms that encode and/or represent approximate area and approximate number. We discuss these findings in the context of quantity processing and its development.

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“…Looking time studies revealed that 5-month-old infants are sensitive to changes in metric distances (Newcombe, Huttenlocher, & Learmonth, 1999;Newcombe, Sluzenski & Huttenlocher, 2005), and toddlers encode distance metrically in a hide-and-seek game (Huttenlocher, Newcombe, & Sandberg, 1994). Furthermore, magnitude coding is used early in life, as evidenced by infants' discrimination of space, time, number, and speed (Brannon, Lutz, & Cordes, 2006;Brannon, Suanda, & Libertus, 2007;Möhring, Libertus, & Bertin, 2012;Xu & Spelke, 2000), and recent studies yielded evidence for cross-dimensional transfer, suggesting that magnitude information regarding various dimensions is coded in one representational system (de Hevia & Spelke, 2010;Lourenco & Longo, 2010). It is likely that metric understanding is based on this fundamental comparative system, termed the general magnitude system (Walsh, 2003).…”

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confidence: 99%

Zooming in on spatial scaling: Preschool children and adults use mental transformations to scale spaces.

Möhring¹,

Newcombe²,

Frick³

2014

Developmental Psychology

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Spatial scaling is an important prerequisite for many spatial tasks and involves an understanding of how distances in different-sized spaces correspond. Previous studies have found evidence for such an understanding in preschoolers; however, the mental processes involved remain unclear. The present study investigated whether children and adults use mental transformations to scale distances in space. Adults and 4-and 5-year-old children (N = 60) were asked to use maps to locate target objects in a larger referent space on a touchscreen. The size of the referent space was held constant, but the sizes of the maps were varied systematically, resulting in seven scaling factors. A linear increase in response times and errors with increasing scaling factor suggested that participants of every age group mentally transformed the size of the map to compare it to the referent, providing evidence for an analog imagery strategy in children's and adults' spatial scaling. Spatial scaling is fundamental to many spatial tasks that require an understanding of how distances in different-sized spaces are related. The ability to map distances from one space to another is involved in many daily activities, such as interpreting navigation aids or imagining the height of a building by looking at its blueprint. Around the age of 3 years, children are able to establish symbolic correspondence between a model and its referent (DeLoache, 1987), but successful mapping between spatial representations also requires an understanding of geometric correspondence (Downs, 1985;Newcombe & Huttenlocher, 2000).A crucial precondition for establishing geometric correspondence is the ability to encode distances in a metric manner. There is evidence that metric coding is present early in life. Looking time studies revealed that 5-month-old infants are sensitive to changes in metric distances (Newcombe, Huttenlocher, & Learmonth, 1999;Newcombe, Sluzenski & Huttenlocher, 2005), and toddlers encode distance metrically in a hide-and-seek game (Huttenlocher, Newcombe, & Sandberg, 1994). Furthermore, magnitude coding is used early in life, as evidenced by infants' discrimination of space, time, number, and speed (Brannon, Lutz, & Cordes, 2006;Brannon, Suanda, & Libertus, 2007;Möhring, Libertus, & Bertin, 2012;Xu & Spelke, 2000), and recent studies yielded evidence for cross-dimensional transfer, suggesting that magnitude information regarding various dimensions is coded in one representational system (de Hevia & Spelke, 2010;Lourenco & Longo, 2010). It is likely that metric understanding is based on this fundamental comparative system, termed the general magnitude system (Walsh, 2003).A second crucial step in establishing geometric correspondence is to map distances from one space to another, which -for different sized spaces -requires spatial scaling. Running Head: ZOOMING IN ON SPATIAL SCALING 4Previous research has shown that if task demands are low and locations vary on one dimension only, 3-year-olds are able to locate objects in a referent space,...

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Speed discrimination in 6- and 10-month-old infants follows Weber’s law

Cited by 50 publications

References 45 publications

Children’s mappings between number words and the approximate number system

Children’s mappings between number words and the approximate number system

Developmental change in the acuity of approximate number and area representations.

Zooming in on spatial scaling: Preschool children and adults use mental transformations to scale spaces.

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