Our ability to think of numbers as abstract concepts is probably innate and even babies barely a few hours old seem to have the ability, researchers say.

Abstract numerical thought is the ability to perceive numbers as entities, independently of specific things. It can be demonstrated by the humans capacity to link a certain number of objects to the same number of sounds, irrespective of what the specific sounds or objects are. But whether this ability is innate or learned through culture or language wasn’t known.

To investigate, Véronique Izard of Harvard University and colleagues worked with 16 newborns, whose ages ranged from 7 to 100 hours.

Each baby was first played a 2-minute tape that contained spoken syllables, such as “ra ra ra ra me me me me”). Then, with the tape playing in the background, the baby was shown a sequence of images with abstract geometrical objects (see movie, .mov format, 2.27 MB), in which each alternate image had the number of objects that tallied with the number of syllables.


The researchers found that 15 of 16 newborns looked significantly longer at the correct image. “This is telling us that babies, within a couple of hours after they are born, have a very abstract representation of numbers that applies similarly to visual and audio stimuli,” says Izard.

An earlier study found that babies a few months old, who were played two voices, paid more attention to a video of two rather than three faces. But in this case the babies might just have learned to link faces with voices, Izard says.

The babies in the new study weren’t always cooperative. The researchers had to discard data from 50 infants, either because they were being fussy, or fell asleep, or had to be looked after by their handlers.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0812142106)