They may seem to just eat, cry, sleep and poo, but 3-month-old babies may already be aware of how many animals are dangling from their mobiles. Véronique Izard at the University of Paris-South in France and her colleagues have discovered that babies have brain circuits dedicated to noticing quantity, adding weight to the argument that humans possess an innate sense of numbers.
Izard had already shown in adults and 4-year-olds that numbers seem to be processed in a particular part of the brain, and separately from other information. To find out if 3-month-old babies did the same, the…
