The making of number: from content to representation

Despite their importance to human thought, the origins of numerical abilities remain debated. Numerical quantity is a property of physical objects and events, and both humans and many animals show an innate sensitivity to this numerical content. Yet how this content is represented is a separate question: it may be encoded nonsymbolically by an innate estimation system or symbolically through culturally developed formats, such as numeral notations and number words. Distinguishing content from representational format reconciles the views that numbers are innate (nativism), learned (empiricism), or constructed (emergentism). Converging evidence from developmental psychology, comparative cognition, neuroscience, and computation suggests that number is dynamically coconstructed by biological predispositions and cultural practices, a framework that generalizes to other domains of human cognition, such as geometry and language.