Evidence against continuous variables driving numerical discrimination in infancy

Abstract

Over the past decades, abundant evidence has amassed that demonstrates infants’ sensitivity to changes in number. Nonetheless, a prevalent view is that infants are more sensitive to continuous properties of stimulus arrays such as surface area and contour length than they are to numerosity. Very little research, however, has directly addressed infants’ sensitivity to contour. Here we used a change detection paradigm to assess infants’ acuity for the cumulative contour length of an array when the array’s surface area and number were held constant. Seven-month-old infants detected a threefold change in contour length but failed to detect a twofold change. These results, in conjunction with previously published data on numerosity discrimination using the same experimental paradigm, suggest that infants are not more sensitive to changes in contour length compared to changes in numerosity. Consequently, these findings undermine the claim that attention toward contour length is a primary driver of numerical discrimination in infancy.