So says Véronique Izard, a graduate of the École polytechnique with a passion for music, but above all a researcher in cognitive psychology whose PhD supervisor was Stanislas Dehaene. For instance, she plays the same syllable to an infant four times in a row, then shows them four dots on a board. The child will look at it for twenty-five seconds, whereas if the same operation is done with four syllables and an image with twelve dots, the child will only look at it for ten seconds. The researcher's conclusions from her many experiments? Babies process very small numbers differently from other numbers: they assess the former as objects, and the latter approximately. "Newborns have a very general sense of quantity that will support them in all their learning."
