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Finger Numeral Representations: More than Just Another Symbolic Code

Samuel Di Luca,M. Pesenti

Published 2011 in Front. Psychology

ABSTRACT

Representing numerosities with finger configurations offers children the opportunity to learn and internalize fundamental properties of natural numbers through sensory–motor interactions with the world. Recent findings show that even educated adults use their fingers as a visuo-motor support to process, represent, and communicate numerosities. Indeed, using fingers to represent numerosities prototypically has been shown to give the corresponding finger configurations a special status in long-term memory: these configurations are recognized and processed faster than other finger configurations, providing a direct access to number magnitude, what other finger configurations do less efficiently. This occurs for configurations stemming from finger counting (i.e., the way the fingers are raised to count for oneself; for example, thumb, index, and middle fingers for numerosity {3}) and from finger montring (i.e., the way fingers are raised to show numerosities to someone else; for example, index, middle, and ring fingers for numerosity {3}). However, finger numeral representation is not just another way of representing numerical magnitudes mentally. We argue that it also contributes to acquiring, building, and then accessing number semantics, and that, compared to other numerical representations, it provides an extra value by rooting number meaning in a culturally shared yet non-arbitrary and self-experienced sensory–motor representation.

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