Links of Babies’ mental capacity with numbers, space and time 

By Marcelino Ortiz C.

Researchers from Emory University in Atlanta, United States, have discovered that, even before learning to speak, babies organize information about numbers, space and time in more complex ways than previously thought.

The team that carried out the study verified that 9-month-olds are sensitive to “more than” or “less than” relations across the number, size and duration of objects.

What’s really amazing is that they only need experience with one of these quantitative concepts to guess what the other quantities should look like. 

What has been discovered in this research indicates that humans use information about quantity to organize our experience of the world from the first few months of life, and quantity seems to be a powerful tool to make predictions about how objects should behave.

The scientists focused on the development of spatial perception, and how it interacts with other cognitive dimensions, such as numerical processing and time perception.

Previous researches suggest that these cognitive domains are deeply connected at neural level, because the experiments show, for example, that adults mind associate smaller numbers with the left side of space, and bigger numbers with the right side.

Other experiments show that when adults are asked to quickly choose the higher number of two, the task becomes much harder if the higher number is represented as physically smaller that the lower number.

Cubasi  Translation Staff