{"pk":50298,"title":"The Role of Compositionality in Children's Creating Representations of Large Exact Numbers: A Case Study of the Number Five","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Compositional capacity (i.e., chunking four objects as two sets of two) can extend 12- to 14-month-old infants' working memory capacity from three to four1,2,3. Here we ask whether numerical composition supports 3- to 4.5-year-olds' creating representations of large exact numbers such as five. In a non-verbal object-tracking task (See Fig1a), subset-knowers and most young CP-knowers failed to track exactly five objects. In two experimental manipulations, we provided children with spatiotemporal, linguistic, and/or color chunking cues. If tracking sets of five as a composition of two and three is within children's compositional capacities, they should perform better than children from baseline. We found no evidence that 3- to 4.5-year-olds can represent exactly five by composing representations of two and three (Exp.1: F(4, 133) = 5.69, β = -0.03, p = .509; Exp.2: F(4, 143) = 4.94, β = -0.03, p = .587).","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Psychology; Cognitive development; Representation"}],"section":"Member Abstracts with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3hz8x0s5","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Yiqiao","middle_name":"","last_name":"Wang","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard Univeristy","department":""},{"first_name":"Susan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Carey","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":""},{"first_name":"Elizabeth","middle_name":"","last_name":"Spelke","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/50298/galley/38260/download/"}]}