I Don’t Know About You, Baby, But It’s Still Blooming for Me
Even before they learn to speak, babies are organizing information about numbers, space and time in more complex ways than previously realized, a study led by Emory University psychologist Stella Lourenco finds.
“We’ve shown that 9-month-olds are sensitive to ‘more than’ or ‘less than’ relations across the number, size and duration of objects. And what’s really remarkable is they only need experience with one of these quantitative concepts in order to guess what the other quantities should look like,” Lourenco says.
Lourenco collaborated with neuroscientist Matthew Longo of University College London for the study, to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science.
In his 1890 masterwork, “The Principles of Psychology,” William James described the baby’s impression of the world as “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.”
Accumulating evidence is turning that long-held theory on its head.
“Our findings indicate that humans use information about quantity to organize their experience of the world from the first few months of life,” Lourenco says. “Quantity appears to be a powerful tool for making predictions about how objects should behave.”
illustration by Lionel Ash