Abstract representations of small sets in newborns

From the very first days of life, newborns are not tied to represent narrow, modality- and object-specific aspects of their environment. Rather, they sometimes react to abstract properties shared by stimuli of very different nature, such as approximate numerosity or magnitude. As of now, however, there is no evidence that newborns possess abstract representations that apply to small sets: in particular, while newborns can match large approximate numerosities across senses, this ability does not extend to small numerosities. In two experiments, we presented newborn infants (N = 64, age 17 to 98 h) with patterned sets AB or ABB simultaneously in the auditory and visual modalities. Auditory patterns were presented as periodic sequences of sounds (AB: triangle-drum-triangle-drum-triangle-drum …; ABB: triangle-drum-drum-triangle-drum-drum-triangle-drum-drum …), and visual patterns as arrays of 2 or 3 shapes (AB: circle-diamond; ABB: circle-diamond-diamond). In both experiments, we found that participants reacted and looked longer when the patterns matched across the auditory and visual modalities – provided that the first stimulus they received was congruent. These findings uncover the existence of yet another type of abstract representations at birth, applying to small sets. As such, they bolster the hypothesis that newborns are endowed with the capacity to represent their environment in broad strokes, in terms of its most abstract properties. This capacity for abstraction could later serve as a scaffold for infants to learn about the particular entities surrounding them.