Infants’ auditory enumeration: Evidence for analog magnitudes in the small number range

Vigorous debate surrounds the issue of whether infants use different representational mechanisms to discriminate small and large numbers. We report evidence for ratio-dependent performance in infants’ discrimination of small numbers of auditory events, suggesting that infants can use analog magnitudes to represent small values, at least in the auditory domain. Seven-month-old infants in the present study reliably discriminated two from four tones (a 1:2 ratio) in Experiment 1, when melodic and continuous temporal properties of the sequences were controlled, but failed to discriminate two from three tones (a 2:3 ratio) under the same conditions in Experiment 2. A third experiment ruled out the possibility that infants in Experiment 1 were responding to greater melodic variety in the four-tone sequences. The discrimination function obtained here is the same as that found for infants’ discrimination of large numbers of visual and auditory items at a similar age, as well as for that obtained for similar-aged infants’ duration discriminations, and thus adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that human infants may share with adults and nonhuman animals a mechanism for representing quantities as “noisy” mental magnitudes.