Source: Laboratories of Nicholaus Noles and Judith Danovitch—University of Louisville

One of the goals of the modern education system is to teach children mathematical literacy. They are taught to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, and this base knowledge is used to support learning about geometry, algebra, calculus, physics, and statistics. School-aged children usually acquire these skills in formal educational settings, but the foundation of mathematical understanding is developed much earlier in life.

As infants, humans begin to form the rough representations that allow them to make judgments about number, and perhaps the first numerical concept that humans develop is the idea of less versus more. However, probing these concepts can be challenging, because even if babies have some understanding of number, they have very few ways of showing off what they know. What they can do is crawl, eat, cry, and sleep. Thus, researchers developed a task using this limited set of responses to investigate whether babies can mentally represent number.

This experiment demonstrates how researchers can creatively use food to study concepts of numerical cognition in infants using the method by Feigenson, Carey, and Hauser.¹