Abstract
Finger counting is one of the first steps in the development of mature number concepts. With a one-to-one correspondence of fingers to numbers in Western finger counting, fingers hold two numerical meanings: one is based on the number of fingers raised and the second is based on their ordinal position within the habitual finger counting sequence. This study investigated how these two numerical meanings of fingers are intertwined with numerical cognition in adults. Participants received tactile stimulation on their fingertips of one hand and named either the number of fingers stimulated (2, 3, or 4 fingers; Experiment 1) or the number of stimulations on one fingertip (2, 3, or 4 stimulations; Experiment 2). Responses were faster and more accurate when the set of stimulated fingers corresponded to finger counting habits (Experiment 1) and when the number of stimulations matched the ordinal position of the stimulated finger (Experiment 2). These results show that tactile numerosity perception is affected by individual finger counting habits and that those habits give numerical meaning to single fingers.
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Notes
All individual stimulation durations range from 47 to 180 ms and all total stimulation durations range from 260 to 640 ms. Although participants might learn that 47 ms could never involve two stimulations, we chose not to use the shortest individual stimulation length for two stimulations, because that would have resulted in a very short (154 ms) total stimulation length which would have given away the numerosity without requiring actually counting the number of individual stimulations. Furthermore, additional analyses showed that there was no training effect selectively for stimulation conditions involving 47 ms-stimulations.
To keep the size of the model reasonable, only factors of theoretical interest were modeled. For instance, the factor Hand (left/right) was not included. Moreover, including Hand as a fixed factor would not bring about any significant main effects or interactions in the complete models except for a three-way interaction of DC × Hand × NUM in the sequential condition.
The index finger of the opposite hand was always the responding finger, so one could expect interactions with stimulations to the index finger. We therefore coded a new factor “Response Finger” (i.e., index finger or not) and ran the (generalized) linear mixed models with the fixed factors Congruency, Response Finger, and their interaction and as random factors Subject, Response condition, and Stimulation pattern and with the random slopes determined as described above; there were no random slopes for the RT analysis and by-subject random slopes for Congruency and Response Finger as well as by-pattern random slopes for Congruency for the accuracy analysis. There were no significant interactions between Congruency and Response Finger for RTs or accuracy.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) Grant Fi-1915/2 - 1 “manumerical cognition”.
Funding
This study was funded by DFG (Grant number Fi-1915/2 - 1 on “manumerical cognition”).
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All experiments of the study were conducted in accordance with the ethical standards expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki.
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Sixtus, E., Lindemann, O. & Fischer, M.H. Stimulating numbers: signatures of finger counting in numerosity processing. Psychological Research 84, 152–167 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-0982-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-0982-y