Blindness and deafness: A window to study the visual and verbal basis of the number sense

Abstract

When children acquire numerical skills, they have to learn a variety of specific numerical tools. The most obvious are the numerical codes such as number words (one, two, three, etc.) or Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, etc.). Other skills will be relatively more abstract: arithmetical facts (i.e., 4 × 2 = 8), arithmetical procedures (i.e., borrowing), or arithmetical laws (i.e., a + b = b + a). The acquisition of these numerical tools is complex and probably not facilitated by the fact that a numerical expression does not have a single meaning. Indeed, numbers can be used as a kind of label or proper name (i.e., Bus 51). They can also be part of a familiar fixed sequence (i.e., 51 comes immediately after 50 and before 52). They can be used to refer to continuous analogue quantities (i.e., 51,2 grams) (Butterworth, 2005; Fuson, 1988) and, most importantly, they can be used to denote the number of things in a set – the cardinality of the set. Children are able to understand the special meaning of cardinality because they possess a specific and innate capacity for dealing with quantities (Feigenson et al., 2004). Supporting the innate nature of the “number sense,” it has been found, for instance, that fetuses in the last trimester are already able to discriminate auditory numerical quantities (Schleger et al., 2014). A large set of behavioral studies using the classic method of habituation has also revealed sensitivity to small numerosities (e.g., Starkey & Cooper, 1980) in young children. In the study of Starkey and Cooper (1980), for example, slides with a fixed number of 2 dots were repeatedly presented to 4to 6-month-old infants until their looking time decreased, indicating habituation. At that point, a slide with a deviant number of 3 dots was presented and yielded significantly longer looking times, indicating dishabituation and therefore discrimination between the numerosities 2 and 3. This effect was replicated with newborns (Antell & Keating, 1983) and with various stimuli such as sets of realistic objects (Strauss & Curtis, 1981), targets in motion (Van Loosbroek & Smitsman, 1990; Wynn et al., 2002), twoand threesyllable words (Bijeljac-Babic et al., 1991), or puppet making two or three sequential jumps (Wood & Spelke, 2005; Wynn, 1996). However, it was not observed