Numbers in Mind
Babies' ballyhooed counting skills add up to controversy
By Bruce Bower
In 1992, Karen Wynn’s numbers came in big. The numbers in question were tiny in an absolute sense, but they counted for a lot among investigators of child development. The reason: Wynn claimed to have exposed intuitive arithmetic skills of 5-month-old babies. The young psychologist, having received her doctorate in psychology just 2 years earlier, reported that infants show a facility for adding and
subtracting small numbers of items, on the order of 1 + 1 = 2 and 2 – 1 = 1. Her results appeared in a major scientific journal, attracted worldwide media coverage (SN: 8/29/92, p. 132), and inspired a wave of research into what she regards as infants’ seemingly innate “number sense.”