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Babies have astonishing math skills from the day they're born

baby newborn
She's already surprisingly good at math. derekmswanson/Flickr

Researchers are trying to understand how much humans know innately, and what they have to learn.

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So far, their findings hint at something remarkable: From the day they are born, at some level, babies understand numbers.

One of the most fascinating studies seeking to understand this innate ability took place at a hospital in Paris. 

Psychologist Véronique Izard and her team played newborn infants — who were only one to four days old — sounds that were either four or 12 syllables long. 

Then, they showed the newborns pictures that had either four or 12 colorful shapes with smiley faces on them. 

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baby math study
A schematic of the experiment. Izard 2009, PNAS

The babies fixated on the number of shapes that corresponded to the number of sounds they had heard twice as long

We know from previous psychology experiments that when babies look at something longer, it means they prefer it, possibly because they understand it more. 

"The current results, therefore, provide evidence for abstract numerical representations at the start of human life," the authors concluded. 

The study was small; only 16 infants participated in each of three experiments. (Doing research with small babies is difficult work — many had to be excluded from the study because they fell asleep or fussed too much.) But the researchers did control for the risk of accidentally influencing the results by standing behind the baby, who watched the colorful shapes appear on a screen directly in front of them.

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baby toddler innocence cute legos toys happy excited
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Other researchers have dubbed this innate number knowledge the Approximate Number System (ANS). It appears long "before [the] acquisition of language and cultural metaphors," noted another recent study in the field.

And it's not unique to humans — other animals have an ANS, too. 

The system allows us to recognize numbers without assigning symbols to them. Researchers think it's part of why animals like guppies can discern between ratios, and lemurs can learn numerical rules

Humans, and other animals, have an astonishing understanding of numbers from the very beginning of our lives. We should remember that the next time we get stuck on a math problem. 

Babies Psychology Baby
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