While some researchers claim that infants have an innate ability to discriminate numbers and perform simple math, this view is debated. Tests show that infants under 14-16 months struggle with basic "more than" and "less than" judgments. The methods used to assess infant numeracy have been criticized for not controlling for non-numerical elements like total area or amount of a stimulus that could influence infants' responses. More research is needed to determine whether infants truly have innate numerical abilities or are responding to low-level visual properties of number-like stimuli.
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Scholify essay developmental, maths debate
1. Debate: Arguing against Do human infants have
an ability to discriminate number and to add and subtract simple numbers?
Many researchers have claimed that young infants have knowledge of number. This
conclusion has arisen from tasks such as infants showing dishabituation to events
occurring at different numbers of times to habituated events, for example showing
three compared to two dots. This conclusion is rather surprising, as tests of infants
numeracy skills show very poor understanding. For example, Cooper (1984)
demonstrated that children under 14 to 16 months cannot make even simple less-than-
or-more-than judgements. It is to be expected, then, that the methods that have lead to
these conclusions have received much criticism of their reliability. It has been proven
that infants are probably dishabituating to non-numerical elements of the stimuli
presented to them, such as the amount of black on the page, or area taken up by the
display. For example, Clearfield and Mix (2001) habituated infants to a set of dots,
before showing the same amount of dots taking up a larger area, or more dots
covering the original area size. The infants looked longer at the first condition than
the second.
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