Manumerical cognition: Assessing the contributions of ordinal, cardinal and spatial components of finger counting to adult numerical cognition

• Applicant: Professor Martin Fischer
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2013 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 233790787

Inspired by an embodied approach to knowledge representation, this project measures, for the first time, detailed contributions of ordinal, cardinal, and spatial aspects of finger counting to adult numerical cognition. Finger postures in counting have both sequential/ordinal and static/cardinal attributes, and their contributions to number processing in the visual and auditory modalities will be examined with two lines of research. Passive finger stimulation (6 experiments) evaluates whether numerosity discrimination benefits from temporally or spatially distributed tactile stimulation when it is congruent with counting patterns. Active production of counting postures (9 experiments) is also directly measured, and its effects on magnitude and parity processing determined. The expected results inform current theoretical views of knowledge representation, multimodal models of number knowledge, and pedagogical practice.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants