Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Advances in a wide variety of disciplines have begun to tackle the challenge of finding out what happens to which cognitive systems to allow us to develop numerical abilities, yielding mountains of data ripe with explanatory promise (Cohen Kadosh & Dowker 2015). The development of novel experimental methods have allowed ethologists and developmental psychologists to probe into the cognitive abilities and systems operating in preverbal infants and nonhuman animals, hinting at the boundary between our innate cognitive machinery and those formal abilities we develop by interacting with our cultural niche (Carey 2009). Uniting behavioral and brain data has produced strong support for the existence of cognitive systems recruited in the development of our formal numerical abilities (Feigenson, L., Dehaene, S., & Spelke, E. 2004).