Open questions and a proposal: A critical review of the evidence on infant numerical abilities

Considerable research has investigated infants’ numerical capacities. Studies in this domain have used procedures of habituation, head turn, violation of expectation, reaching, and crawling to ask what quantities infants discriminate and represent visually, auditorily as well as intermodally. The concensus view from these studies is that infants possess a numerical system that is amodal and applicable to the quantification of any kind of entity and that this system is fundamentally separate from other systems that represent continuous magnitude. Although there is much evidence consistent with this view, there are also inconsistencies in the data. This paper provides a broad review of what we know, including the evidence suggesting systematic early knowledge as well as the peculiarities and gaps in the empirical findings with respect to the concensus view. We argue, from these inconsistencies, that the concensus view cannot be entirely correct. In light of the evidence, we propose a new hypothesis, the Signal Clarity hypothesis, that posits a developmental role for dimensions of continuous quantity within the discrete quantity system and calls for a broader research agenda that considers the covariation of discrete and continuous quantities not simply as a problem for experimental control but as information that developing infants may use to build more precise and robust representations of number.