Infant Geometry

Geometry is at the foundation of many of humanity’s greatest cultural achievements, from art and architecture to science and technology. This chapter explores the origins of humans’ unique capacity for geometry by describing the early emerging geometric sensitivities of human infants. Initially, infants show limited sensitivities to the geometry of 2D visual forms, discriminating the relative lengths of a form’s parts but not the angles at which those parts meet, consistent with the hypothesis that infants differentiate forms by their shape skeletons. Nevertheless, infants’ sensitivities to the geometry of 2D visual forms may become increasingly abstract with their acquisition of natural language, paralleling the increased geometric abstraction that underlies toddlers’ developing 3D object recognition and categorization. Such development may ultimately support informal learning of the foundational geometric building blocks of formal geometry, like those found in Euclid’s Elements, with concepts like parallelism, perpendicularity, and angle, and may thus set the stage for formal learning of geometry in school.