The main focus of my research is how human infants and adults, and non-human animals represent number. By studying cognitive abilities in non-human animals and human infancy we can understand both the evolution and the ontogeny of cognition and thereby define the primitives upon which adult human cognition is built. Numerical cognition is a good candidate for studying thought in the absence of language because there is growing evidence that even in adult humans some types of numerical thinking occurs independently of language and because infants and animals appear to possess abstract numerical concepts. My broad research goal is to determine the similarities and differences in the cognitive processes that human adults, infants, and animals use in numerical thought and to explore the brain systems that support thinking about number.
