While some researchers claim that infants have an innate ability to discriminate numbers and perform simple math, this view is debated. Tests show that infants under 14-16 months struggle with basic less than/greater than judgments, suggesting their poor understanding of numeracy. Methods used to argue infants can distinguish numbers have received criticism for not controlling for non-numerical elements like total area or amount that infants could be responding to rather than number itself. More research is needed to understand infants' early number skills.

1. Debate: Arguing against ‘Do human infants have
an ability to discriminate number and to add and subtract simple numbers?’
Many researchers have claimed that young infants have knowledge of number. This
conclusion has arisen from tasks such as infants showing dishabituation to events
occurring at different numbers of times to habituated events, for example showing
three compared to two dots. This conclusion is rather surprising, as tests of infant’s
numeracy skills show very poor understanding. For example, Cooper (1984)
demonstrated that children under 14 to 16 months cannot make even simple less-than-
or-more-than judgements. It is to be expected, then, that the methods that have lead to
these conclusions have received much criticism of their reliability. It has been proven
that infants are probably dishabituating to non-numerical elements of the stimuli
presented to them, such as the amount of black on the page, or area taken up by the
display. For example, Clearfield and Mix (2001) habituated infants to a set of dots,
before showing the same amount of dots taking up a larger area, or more dots
covering the original area size. The infants looked longer at the first condition than
the second.
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