Nature or Nurture in Finger Counting: A Review on the Determinants of the Direction of Number?Finger Mapping

Paola Previtali,Luisa Girelli,Luca Rinaldi

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00363

Abstract

The spontaneous use of finger counting has been for long recognized as critical to the acquisition of number skills. Recently, the great interest on space–number associations shifted attention to the practice of finger counting itself, and specifically, to its spatial components. Besides general cross-cultural differences in mapping numbers onto fingers, contrasting results have been reported with regard to the directional features of this mapping. The key issue we address is to what extent directionality is culturally mediated, i.e., linked to the conventional reading–writing system direction, and/or biologically determined, i.e., linked to hand dominance. Although the preferred starting-hand for counting seems to depend on the surveyed population, even within the same population high inter-individual variability minimizes the role of cultural factors. Even if so far largely overlooked, handedness represents a sound candidate for shaping finger counting direction. Here we discuss adults and developmental evidence in support of this view and we reconsider the plausibility of multiple and coexistent number–space mapping in physical and representational space.

Highlights

The spontaneous use of finger counting has been for long recognized as critical to the acquisition of number skills
COUNTING ON FINGERS TO COUNT The spontaneous use of fingers and other body parts to count and express numerosities has been reported since the pre-historic age (Ifrah, 1981) and appears to be almost universal, highly variable across cultures
It is worth noting that blind children use their fingers in a less canonical way and less spontaneously than sighted children (Crollen et al, 2011), blind and sighted adults showed similar features in their mental representation of numbers (Castronovo and Seron, 2007; Sallilas et al, 2009). These results suggest that the contribution of finger counting to the mapping of numbers in the representational space may be less critical than considered far

Summary

Introduction

The spontaneous use of finger counting has been for long recognized as critical to the acquisition of number skills. Besides an increasing interest in finger counting practice, systematic investigations of its structural features, such as directionality, are still limited and mostly focused on cross-cultural differences (Lindemann et al, 2011).

Results

Conclusion