Does finger training increase young children's numerical performance?

Identifying Opportunities for Grade One Children to Acquire Foundational Number Sense: Developing a Framework for Cross Cultural Classroom Analyses

“…The better a child understands a partition as a representation of a number, the better developed is that child's later understanding of numerical structures (Thomas et al 2002) and arithmetical skills (Hunting 2003). The more competent a child is with regard to the use of fingers in both counting and early arithmetic, skills that can be taught effectively (Gracia-Bafalluy and Noël 2008), the more competent that child is in later years (Fayol et al 1998;Jordan et al 1992;Noël 2005). Significantly, the use of finger strategies increases as socio-economic status increases, justifying targeted interventions Levine et al 1992 …”

The role of vision in the development of finger–number interactions: Finger-counting and finger-montring in blind children

“…In addition, performance on finger discrimination tasks at 5 years of age was shown to be a good predictor of arithmetic abilities at 6 and 8 years of age (Fayol, Barrouillet, & Marinthe, 1998;Marinthe, Fayol, & Barrouillet, 2001). This finding was replicated by Noël (2005) and extended by Gracia-Bafalluy and Noël (2008), who observed that 8 weeks of finger gnosis training could improve three numerical abilities (i.e., subitizing, finger configuration naming, and ordinality judgment) in a group of first graders (but see Fischer, 2010).…”

“…In the counting with articulatory suppression task, the articulatory rehearsal process was blocked, whereas in the two-syllable counting task, the presentation rhythm of the two syllables was so fast that keeping track of the two counting sequences was very demanding. Because learning basic arithmetic abilities is often very demanding for children's working memory, one may wonder whether training the finger-counting behavior of blind children could improve their numerical abilities (see Gracia-Bafalluy & Noël, 2008, for similar results with sighted children). Moreover, because finger discrimination appeared to be a good predictor of sighted children's arithmetic abilities (Fayol et al, 1998;Marinthe et al, 2001;Noël, 2005), it could be interesting to test whether working memory capacity might be a good predictor of blind children's arithmetic abilities.…”

Development of spatial preferences for counting and picture naming

“…However, the developmental trajectory of these measures is still unclear. Given that some studies identified finger awareness (finger gnosia) as a significant predictor of arithmetic performance in young children (Gracia-Bafalluy & Noël, 2008;Noël, 2005;Reeve & Humberstone, 2011) we set out to determine more precisely the age at which German preschool children first reliably consider numbers as being spatially distributed from left-to-right, how they do so with their fingers compared to other objects, and whether a leftto-right preference is continuous across age groups. We also asked whether possible trends in spatial preferences would be systematically related to number knowledge.…”