Abstract
Converging evidence suggests that representations of number, space, and other dimensions depend on a general representation of magnitude. However, it is unclear whether there exists a privileged relation between certain magnitude dimensions or if all continuous magnitudes are equivalently related. Four-year-old children and adults were tested with three magnitude comparison tasks – nonsymbolic number, line length, and luminance – to determine whether individual differences in sensitivity are stable across dimensions. A Weber fraction (w) was calculated for each participant in each stimulus dimension. For both children and adults, accuracy and w values for number and line length comparison were significantly correlated, whereas neither accuracy nor w was correlated for number and luminance comparison. However, although line length and luminance comparison performance were not correlated in children, there was a significant relation in adults. These results suggest that there is a privileged relation between number and line length that emerges early in development and that relations between other magnitude dimensions may be later constructed over the course of development.
Highlights
Converging evidence suggests that representations of number, space, and other dimensions depend on a general representation of magnitude
First we conducted an analysis of variance (ANOVA) investigating the effects of task and age group on magnitude comparison performance
The study was designed to ask whether there is a privileged relation between number and line length compared to luminance and whether these relations change over development
Summary
Converging evidence suggests that representations of number, space, and other dimensions depend on a general representation of magnitude. Infants habituated to arbitrary color-magnitude pairings (e.g., large objects: black with stripes; small objects: white with dots) expect the color-pattern pairs to hold across the dimensions of size, number, and time (e.g., more numerous arrays and longer durations: black with stripes; less numerous arrays and shorter durations: white with dots), and look longer when the pattern is violated (e.g., less numerous arrays and shorter durations: black with stripes; more numerous arrays and longer durations: white with dots) (Lourenco & Longo, 2010) These results suggest that infants are sensitive to the relational congruence between large numerosities, large objects, and long durations in comparison to small numerosities, small objects, and short durations. These associations have recently been found in neonates just hours after birth (de Hevia, Izard, Coubart, Spelke, & Streri, 2014), suggesting that they are present even before infants have had a chance to experience correlations between these dimensions in the external world
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