EEG Recordings Show Newborns Distinguish Numbers Within Days of Birth

Researchers fitted 21 newborns aged 0 to 3 days with EEG caps and recorded electrical brain activity while the infants heard groups of four or twelve syllables and viewed matching or mismatched sets of four or twelve dots. Activity in the parietotemporal area decreased when the number of dots matched the number of syllables. Activity rose when the numbers did not match.

Marco Buiatti at the University of Trento led the work. The parietotemporal area processes sensory information, and the pattern matches repetition suppression seen in adults, in which the brain reduces its response to a repeated stimulus. When the counts differed, neural activity increased instead.

The findings indicate that a neural mechanism supporting an approximate sense of number operates within the first days of life. Brian Butterworth at University College London, who was not involved in the research, said extracting numerical information from the environment forms part of humans’ essential start-up toolkit.

Buiatti noted that a child’s number sense at age 1 predicts later maths skills.

He said further study of these mechanisms could aid identification of infants at risk of dyscalculia, a difficulty with numerical information. The work was published on bioRxiv under DOI 10.64898/2026.05.08.723896.