"Catastrophic" set size limits on infants’ capacity to represent objects: A systematic review and Bayesian meta-analysis

Decades of research has revealed that humans can concurrently represent small quantities of three-dimensional objects as those objects move through space or into occlusion. For infants (but not older children or adults), this ability apparently comes with a significant limitation: when the number of occluded objects exceeds three, infants experience what has been characterized as a “catastrophic” set size limit, failing to represent even the approximate quantity of the hidden array. Infants’ apparent catastrophic representational failures suggest a significant information processing limitation in the first years of life, and the evidence has been used as support for prominent theories of the development of object and numerical cognition. However, the evidence for catastrophic failure consists of individual small-n experiments that use null hypothesis significance testing to obtain null results (i.e., p > .05). Whether catastrophic representational failures are robust or reliable across studies, methods, and labs is not known. Here we report a systematic review and Bayesian meta-analysis to examine the strength of the evidence in favor of catastrophic representational failures in infancy. Our analysis of 22 experiments across 12 reports, with a combined total of n = 367 infants aged 10-20 months, revealed strong support for the evidence for catastrophic set size limits. A complementary analysis found moderate support for infants’ success when representing fewer than four objects. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of object and numerical cognitive development.