Does speaking more than one language help a child perform better on certain types of cognitive tasks? One possibility is that bilingualism confers either specific or general cognitive advantages on tasks that require selective attention to one dimension over another (e.g. Bialystok, [Bialystok, E., 2001]; Hilchey & Klein, [Hilchey, M.D.,…

Previous studies have shown that as a group 6-month-old infants successfully discriminate numerical changes when the values differ by at least a 1:2 ratio but fail at a 2:3 ratio (e.g. 8 vs. 16 but not 8 vs. 12). However, no studies have yet examined individual differences in number discrimination in infancy. Using a novel numerical change…

Two experiments investigated developmental changes in large number discrimination with visual-spatial arrays. Previous studies found that 6-month-old infants were able to discriminate arrays that differ by a ratio of 1:2 but not 2:3. We found that by 10 months, infants were able to reliably discriminate 8 from 12 elements (2:3) but not 8 from 10…

Are abstract representations of number--representations that are independent of the particular type of entities that are enumerated--a product of human language or culture, or do they trace back to human infancy? To address this question, four experiments investigated whether human infants discriminate between sequences of actions (jumps of a…

Ninety-eight participants from 5 age groups with mean ages of 6, 8, 10, 22, and 72 years were tested in a series of speeded number discriminations. Found that response time slope as a function of number size decreased with age for numbers in the 1-4 range. (MDM)

Groups of eight- and ten-year-olds and adults visually searched for the presence of a target letter or number in fields of items that were either of the same or a different category (letter or number) than the target. (JMB)