Abstract
Recent evidence has shown that, like adults and children, 9-month-old infants manifest an operational momentum (OM) effect during non-symbolic arithmetic, whereby they overestimate the outcomes to addition problems, and underestimate the outcomes to subtraction problems. Here we provide the first evidence that OM occurs for transformations of non-numerical magnitudes (i.e., spatial extent) during ordering operations. Twelve-month-old infants were tested in an ordinal task in which they detected and represented ascension or descension in physical size, and then responded to ordinal sequences that exhibited greater or lesser sizes. Infants displayed longer looking time to the size change whose direction violated the operational momentum experienced during habituation (i.e., the smaller sequence in the ascension condition and the larger sequence in the descension condition). The presence of momentum for ordering size during infancy suggests that continuous quantities are represented spatially during the first year of life.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are indebted to parents and infants who donated their time to participate in the study. The authors also thank Carlo Toneatto for invaluable contribution in programming the experiment, and Simona Quirito and Marika Cometti for help in recruiting and testing infants. This work was partially supported by award R15-HD077518-01A1 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the second author. MDdH was supported by a Marie Curie IntraEuropean Fellowship for Career Development (SpaNum 272633).
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Macchi Cassia, V., McCrink, K., de Hevia, M.D. et al. Operational momentum and size ordering in preverbal infants. Psychological Research 80, 360–367 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-016-0750-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-016-0750-9