Newborn infants show neural sensitivity to changes in auditorily presented numerical information
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Human infants are assumed to be born with an innate understanding of quantities—a number sense— that enables them to detect non-symbolic number differences, for example, between sets of objects. This early ability has been found to be a predictor of later math skills. The assumption of innateness is based largely on studies in infants at 6 months of age or older and using visual stimuli with large numerosities, or in studies lacking statistical power. Using EEG, we studied pre-attentive discrimination for auditorily presented non-verbal numerical and non-numerical magnitudes of sleeping newborns (N = 104) to investigate whether the newborn auditory system is discriminating the number of sequentially presented sounds. The results showed that the 2-part repeated standard sound was discriminated from 3-part deviating sound and from 1-part deviating sound. As also the responses to 3-part sound differed from the responses of the same stimulus presented alone as a control, these results suggest that the difference between 2-part repeated sound and 3-part deviant sound is not merely due to physical features of the stimuli but reflects processing of numerosity. These results suggest that newborn infants are able to pre-attentively process at least some differences in the number of stimuli supporting the view of innateness of numerical magnitude discrimination. As the earlier evidence for innateness in newborns is limited, our study utilising small numerosities and auditory modality instead of vision—given the confounds in visual paradigms—offers complementary results on the innate brain processing on numerical information.
