Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The human mind can compress visual experiences via universal quantification, expressed with the words All and Each.We tested adults and infants representations underlying the tracking of collectively-exhaustive actions or distributively-exhaustive actions. In Experiment 1, adults spontaneously used the word All to describe movies where agents all pursueda single ball together and Each for those where each agent chased its own ball. Crucially, the use of Each, but not of All,significantly decreased when there were more than 3 chasers, suggesting that Each piggybacked on the representation ofdiscrete individuals, while All on the representation of a single collective event. In Experiment 2, infants habituated to theAll movies successfully dishabituated to the Each movies and vice versa, when the chasers were 3. These findings begin tosuggest that the representations of collectively-exhaustive and distributively-exhaustive actions that connect with naturallanguage quantifiers are in place early in life.