Infants can count

Excerpts from my eBook...Baby Math How Infants Perceive Numbers Zoe, 29 Months Old Starts To Count Up To 30 Hi Dr. Leo, By 13 months, Zoecouldsay: Elmo, thank you, mama, dada, milk, drink, uh-oh, ba ba black sheep, no. By 21 months she knows her colors - blue red yellow pink orange green purple black white. She can count up to 10 with a little help and knows portions of the whole alphabet. By 23 months, she knows her alphabet, meaning, saying in a row, from memory, A - O for example. She knows how to count up to 13 for sure and with help 20. She counts often in the day. She knows she is two. She sorts things that are alike all the time, the same size blocks, spoons, covers, etc. and line them up or stack them on top of each other. By 29 months, she knows her shapes: star, heart, circle, square, rectangle, oval, triangle and even hexagon. She also knows her body: eyes, nose, tongue, eye brows, hair, legs, knees, feet, toes, arms, hands, fingers, elbow, thumbs, belly, butt, chest shoulders. Now also she knows the days of the week and months of the year She knows how her name is spelled. She also knows how Cody’s name is spelled. She counts to 20 with no problem and is starting to count to 30. Leah Infants including newborns can perceive differences in shape, color, size, and numbers. In 1980 in Prentice Starkey’s laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, 72 babies from 16 to 30 weeks old were studied. The babies sat on their mothers’ lap facing a screen on which slides are projected. A video camera focusing on the babies’ eyes recorded its gaze. The cameraman was blind to the exact conditions of the experiment. However, he measured exactly how long each baby looked at the slides. When the baby starts looking elsewhere, a new slide appears on the screen. In the first few slides two large dots arrange horizontally were shown. The babies looked briefly at these repetitive two dots. The slides were then changed without warning to a three horizontally doted slides. Immediately, the baby started to fixate longer at these unexpected images. The looking or fixation time when the two dots were shown was 1.9 seconds. When the three dots appeared, the fixation time jumped to 2.4 seconds. This showed that the babies detected the switch from two to three dots. A few years later Sue Antell and Daniel Keating from the University of Maryland demonstrated that even newborns could detect a change from two to three dots. And in another experiment using three sequences of sounds, then changed to two sequences of sounds, babies also noticed the switched. Very young children pay equal attention to the number of sounds as to the number of objects in their environment. Experiments by Karen Wynn in babies 6 months of age concluded that babies could tell the difference if a puppet took two jumps versus three jumps. Studies done by Starkey, Spelke, and Gelman also concluded that babies can “count” sounds. The study used six, seven and eight-month old babies. The babies were seated in front of two slide projectors. The right projector showed two common objects and the left three common objects. Between the screens is a loudspeaker that plays a sequence of drumbeats. A hidden video is focused on the baby’s eyes, measuring the time the babies spent looking at each slide. Initially the babies looked longer at the three objects. After several trials the bias disappeared. When the drumbeats played two, or three beats, the babies looked longer at the slide with the corresponding number of drumbeats. * Please Click on the links below. Only $2.99 Author: How to Raise A Happy, Smart Child (an eBook) http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005UZGCMA Baby Math http://www.amazon.com/BABY-MATH-ebook/dp/B005WA5ZBM/ Leonardo L. Leonidas, MD Assistant Clinical Professor in Pediatrics (retired 2008) Distinguished Career Teaching Award, 2009 Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, USA Outstanding Alumnus UPMASA, 2010 Overseas Teacher of the year, UPMASA, 2006 Graduate, 1968, UP College of Medicine END