In the early 2010s, an experiment asked 21 four-year-old children to look at a screen and select one of two boxes displayed — whichever they thought contained the fewest dots. Three-quarters of them chose correctly when both boxes contained one or more dots. But when a box with zero dots was added as an option, that proportion fell to below 50 per cent. Whether it’s because learning to count often starts with “one”, or because it is associated with the presence (rather than absence) of real-world objects, the idea of nothingness as a number just didn’t compute as intuitively.
在2010年代初，一項實驗要求21名四歲的孩子看著螢幕，從螢幕上顯示的兩個盒子中選擇一個——他們認爲包含的點最少的那個。當兩個盒子都包含一個或多個點時，四分之三的人選擇正確。但當一個沒有點的盒子作爲選項時，這一比例降至50%以下。不知是因爲學習數數通常從「1」開始，還是因爲它與現實世界中物體的存在(而不是不存在)有關，「無」作爲數字的概念並沒有那麼直觀地計算出來。