across Touch and Vision in 5-Month-Old Infants

Infants are known to possess two different cognitive systems to encode numerical informa-tion. The first system encodes approximate numerosities, has no known upper limit and is functional from birth on. The second system relies on infants ’ ability to track up to 3 objects in parallel, and enables them to represent exact numerosity for such small sets. It is unclear, however, whether infants may be able to represent numerosities from all ranges in a com-mon format. In various studies, infants failed to discriminate a small vs. a large numerosity (e.g., 2 vs. 4, 3 vs. 6), although more recent studies presented evidence that infants can succeed at these discriminations in some situations. Here, we used a transfer paradigm be-tween the tactile and visual modalities in 5-month-olds, assuming that such cross-modal paradigm may promote access to abstract representations of numerosities, continuous across the small and large ranges. Infants were first familiarized with 2 to 4 objects in the tactile modality, and subsequently tested for their preference between 2 vs. 4, or 3 vs. 6 vi-sual objects. Results were mixed, with only partial evidence that infants may have trans-ferred numerical information across modalities. Implications on 5-month-old infants ’ ability to represent small and large numerosities in a single or in separate formats are discussed