NUMERICAL ABSTRACTION IN INFANTS - ANOTHER LOOK

This article examines an important finding from the literature on infa nt numerical competence. The finding, reported by P. Starkey, E. S. Sp elke, and R. Gelman (1990), was that infants looked longer toward a vi sual display that was equal in number to an auditory set. In Experimen t 1, when the procedures described by P. Starkey et al. were followed and duration was held constant across auditory sequences that varied i n number, infants looked longer toward the display that was not numeri cally equivalent to the auditory set. In Experiment 2, when the rare a nd duration of the auditory sequences were varied randomly within infa nts, no significant preference for either the equivalent or nonequival ent visual display was shown. These results raise questions about P. S tarkey et al.'s claims that infants can represent the numerosity of se ts in different modalities and then perform one-one correspondence com putations over them.