In studies published in 2003 and 2005, Lisa Feigenson of Johns Hopkins and Susan Carey of Harvard brought 12-to-14-month-old infants into a lab for a manual search task. The infants first watched as an experimenter placed one Ping-Pong ball at a time into a box. “Look at this!” the experimenter said. “What’s in my box?” The babies, who, thanks to the presence of a spiraling ball chute, were pretty motivated to retrieve the balls, subsequently reached into the box themselves to pull them out.

    Except, this being an experiment, the box also had a hidden slit in the back. Thus, after depositing the balls, the experimenter could remove any number of them without the baby being any the wiser. The researchers were interested in whether an infant who had watched three balls enter the box, but could only retrieve two, would scour the box for a longer period of time than if he’d been able to retrieve all three. This would suggest he was able to mentally represent three individual objects.

    Indeed, the babies did demonstrate increased scouring time (by about one to two seconds) in conditions where “balls entered” did not match “balls retrieved.” But this pattern of results only held when the experimenter deposited two or three Ping-Pong balls. When she deposited four, infants lost all expectations about how many balls would be in the box.



geneusutwerk:

If that blows her mind then the Piraha people are going to put her into a coma:

    . Gordon describes a culture whose number words consist of approximately one, approximately two and many. The people who speak this language show poor discrimination between any numeric quantities larger than 3. The evidence comes from a culture named the Pirahã who live in Brazil but reject assimilation to the mainstream Brazilian culture.

and

    The results reported by Gordon indicate that the Pirahã were generally accurate up to quantities of 2 or 3, but their performance deteriorated from 4 to 10. Even with a task where the participant was highly motivated, for example where there was a reward for remembering the difference between 3 and 4, the results were just at the chance level. It is noteworthy that performance for the larger numbers was not random; the answers increased as the overall number increased, suggesting that their answers were a rough approximate of the correct number.

Taken from here PDF. more information about the Piraha on wikipedia


posted 4233 days ago