Newborns also know less left and more right

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Imagine a pair of numbered cards in a straight line from small to large. Unless your primary language (such as Hebrew or Arabic) reads from right to left, chances are you'll rank the smallest number to the left and then to the right according to the size of the number. This preference for mapping numbers into space has long been known, even in some animals. However, scientists have been debating whether it has been rooted in the brain since birth. Newborns associate the concept of "less" with the "left" and the concept of "more" with the "right," according to a new study. This supports the view that such preferences may be innate.
to recruit 80 newborns, who are an average of just 45 hours old, Maria Dolores de Hevia, a psychologist at the University of Paris V in France, asked dozens of novart parents at a local hospital if they could contribute their babies' minutes to scientific research.
, it's not easy to figure out what's going on in the baby's head. To do this, the researchers came up with a series of audio and visual tests. They played repeated audio clips of syllables such as ba or ta, some of which heard six repeating syllables and 18 others. The researchers linked the number of syllables to the concept of "less" or "more". They then showed the baby a rectangle of different sizes on the tablet screen. Babies who heard 6 syllables saw shorter rectangles, while babies who heard 18 syllables noticed longer rectangles.
about a minute later, babies who initially heard six syllables began listening to 18 syllables and had to make a choice: they saw two longer rectangles on the left and a multi-screen window on the right. The researchers and a group of independent observers waited to see which one they would look at. Their inference is that if babies look at the right rectangle for longer, they will link "many" (based on the 18 syllables recently heard) to the "right". Babies who first hear 18 syllables and then six syllables have the opposite device and are expected to associate "less" with "left".
's exactly what happened. On average, newborns who hear 6 syllables and then 18 syllables look at the right rectangle twice as often as they look at the left, and vice versa. De Hevia repeated the test several times in different infants. The results are still valid. The results were published in
. (Source: Science Network Zonghua)