A new study provides evidence that infants can understand numbers as such.
Babies have abstract number sense. They perceive them as one sees a color or feels a temperature. Explanations with Hervé Poirier, editor-in-chief of the magazine Epsiloon.
franceinfo: How can we be sure that infants recognize numbers?
Herve Poirier : The experiment that was carried out at the NeuroSpin Center of the University of Paris-Saclay is impressive. The researchers placed 256 brain wave sensors on the skulls of 26 three-month-old newborns. They let them fall asleep, and, during their sleep, made them listen to sequences of 4 sounds and sequences of 12 sounds. By unraveling the trace of the sensors, they managed to detect the signal encoding this number of sounds: a specific neurological signal for the number 4, and another for the 12. What is impressive is that this signal remained the same when they varied the note of the sound, its duration, its tempo, or the musical instrument. And what is even more impressive is that upon awakening, this signal was still detectable when the babies looked at images of 4 various objects or images of 12.
What conclusions can be drawn ?
That this signal is therefore not linked to the auditory or visual sense, nor to the things to be counted, nor to the state of wakefulness or sleep, nor to the fact of perceiving elements in sequence or simultaneous way. He transcends all this by focusing on a much more abstract datum: it is the signal of the number 4 as such, the signal of 12. This demonstrates that, even when he is not paying attention to it, the number is a basic property automatically extracted from the environment by the infant’s brain.
Does this mean that babies naturally know how to count?
This is an old debate! On the one hand, Plato and the nativists, who believe that humans have innate mathematical abilities, and a pre-installed sense of number; and on the other, John Locke and the empiricists, who insist that almost all knowledge is acquired over time. In the last 25 years, behavioral experiments have been carried out on babies who have not learned arithmetic, on people who have no precise words to designate numbers above 5, and even on animals, wolves, rats, ducks.
What was the result?
All the experiments tipped the scales clearly on Plato’s side. And the latter, neurological, provides the strongest evidence yet that we do have a neural code for numbers. In the same way that it is wired to see colors or feel heat, the brain of humans, but also that of animals, is wired to perceive this very abstract thing that is number. We are all born arithmeticians.
To read the study : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.03.062