| Publications [#250952] of Elizabeth M. Brannon
search PubMed.Journal Articles
- EM Brannon, S Abbott and DJ Lutz, Number bias for the discrimination of large visual sets in infancy.,
Cognition, vol. 93 no. 2
(2004),
pp. B59-B68, ISSN 0010-0277 [15147939], [doi]
(last updated on 2016/06/25)
Abstract: This brief report attempts to resolve the claim that infants preferentially attend to continuous variables over number [e.g. Psychol. Sci. 10 (1999) 408; Cognit. Psychol.44 (2002) 33] with the finding that when continuous variables are controlled, infants as young as 6-months of age discriminate large numerical values [e.g. Psychol. Sci. 14 (2003) 396; Cognition 89 (2003) B15; Cognition 74 (2000) B1]. In two parallel experiments, we compare 6-month-old infants' ability to discriminate number and ignore continuous variables with their ability to form a representation of a cumulative surface area and ignore number. We find that infants discriminate a 2-fold change in number but fail to discriminate a 2-fold change in cumulative surface area. The results point to a more complicated relationship between discrete and continuous dimensions than implied by previous literature.
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