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Leibovich et al. opened up an important discussion on the nature and origins of numerosity perception. The authors rightly point out that non-numerical features of stimuli influence this ability. Despite these biases, there is evidence that from birth, humans perceive and represent numerosities, and not just non-numerical quantitative features such as item size, density, and convex hull.

Although infants and animals respond to the approximate number of elements in visual, auditory, and tactile arrays, only human children and adults have been shown to possess abstract numerical representations that apply to entities of all kinds (e.g., 7 samurai, seas, or sins). Do abstract numerical concepts depend on language or culture, or do they form a part of humans' innate, core knowledge? Here we show that newborn infants spontaneously associate stationary, visual-spatial arrays of 4-18 objects with auditory sequences of events on the basis of number. Their performance provides evidence for abstract numerical representations at the start of postnatal experience.

After haptic habituation to a ring display, infants perceived the rings in two experiments as parts of one connected object. In both haptic and visual modes, infants appeared to perceive object unity by analyzing motion but not by analyzing figural goodness. (RH)

Research on neonatal cognition has developed very recently in comparison with the long history of research on child behavior. The last sixty years of research have provided a great amount of evidence for infants' numerous cognitive abilities. However, only little of this research concerns newborn infants. What do we know about neonatal cognition? Using a variety of paradigms, researchers became able to probe for what newborns know. Amongst these results, we can distinguish several levels of cognitive abilities. First, at the perceptual or sensory level, newborns are able to process information coming from the social world and the physical objects through all their senses. They are able to discriminate between object shapes and between faces; that is, they are able to detect invariants, remember and recognize them. Second, newborns are able to abstract information, to compare different inputs and to match them across different sensory modalities. We will argue that these two levels can be considered high-level cognitive abilities: they constitute the foundations of human cognition. Furthermore, while some perceptual competencies can stem from the fetal period, many of these perceptual and cognitive abilities cannot be a consequence of the environment surrounding the newborn before birth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present research addresses the question of the generality of the ability to transfer shape information from one hand to the eyes recently evidenced in human newborns. Using an intersensory paired-preference procedure, we confirmed that newborns can visually recognize the shape of an object that they have previously manipulated with their right hand, out of sight. However, the results revealed that this ability is absent when the left hand is involved. Handedness in cross-modal transfer task is discussed in relation to other behavioral asymmetries in newborns. Taken together, the present research confirms the existence in some conditions of an early fragile ability to extract shape information in a tactual format and transfer it to a visual format, independent of common experience. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The present research addressed the question of the influence of visual contextual cues on the manual discrimination of spatial orientations in 5-month-old infants. Different types of visual contextual cues were proposed during the haptic discrimination task: congruent–informative, non congruent–informative or noninformative. A familiarisation (with a 60-s fixed-duration)/reaction to novelty procedure was used in three experiments. In Experiment 1, a congruent–informative visual context (a visual context composed of alternate black and white stripes tilted to 20°-left) was present and a haptic discrimination between a 20°-left rod and a 30°-left rod was observed (this discrimination was absent without visual context in Gentaz and Streri''s study, 2004). In Experiment 2, the visual context cues (composed of black dots) were noninformative, and infants could not discriminate these two oblique rods. In Experiment 3, the presence of a non congruent visual context (a visual context composed of alternate black and white stripes tilted to 20°-left, as in Experiment 1) disturbed the gravitational vertical perception usually observed: infants could not discriminate the vertical rod from the 10°-left rod. These results showed that only the informative (congruent and non congruent) visual contextual cues influenced the haptic discrimination of spatial orientations in 5-month-old infants. These results are discussed in relation with data observed in adults and with the current models of the multisensorial integration and attentional level. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]