Detection of, versus discriminating between, different numerosities
Titia Gebuis, Bert Reynvoet and Maarten van der Smagt
Presenting author: Titia Gebuis
The human ability to distinguish between different numerosities, already
present at infancy, becomes more accurate with increasing age. The acuity of
numerosity discrimination has been suggested to be a predictor for future
mathematical abilities. Modeling the development of the numerosity
discrimination ability therefore allows monitoring children’s future
mathematical abilities. Problematic though is that these data are usually
acquired using fundamentally different paradigms, namely detection in infants
versus discrimination in children and adults. In this study we therefore question
whether the comparison of infant data to that of children or adults is justified. To
this end we tested adults on discrimination as well as detection tasks, which
were otherwise methodologically comparable. The results revealed that adults
performed markedly better in the discrimination compared to the detection task.
This implicates that either the infant numerosity discrimination ability has
always been underestimated or that of adults overestimated. Future studies
investigating the development of numerosity discrimination ability should use a
detection paradigm in order to allow inferences from infant data.