Finger gnosia: a predictor of numerical abilities in children?

Abstract

This paper aimed to test the specificity of predicting power of finger gnosia on later numerical abilities in school-age children and to contribute to the understanding of this effect. Forty-one children were tested in the beginning of Grade 1 on finger gnosia, left-right orientation (another sign of the Gerstmann "syndrome"), and global development. Fifteen months later, numerical and reading abilities were assessed. Analyses of the results indicated that, contrary to the general measures of cognitive development, performance in the finger gnosia test was a good predictor of numerical skills 1 year later but not of reading skills, which proves the specificity of that predictor. The same conclusion was also true for the left-right orientation. However, finger gnosia could equally predict performance in numerical tasks that do or do not rely heavily on finger representation or on magnitude representation. Results are discussed in terms of the localizationist and the functional hypotheses.

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).…”

“…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. In our experiment, the first battery was designed to determine whether both groups of children had the level of performance required to undertake the counting tasks of the second test battery.…”

“…This effect indicates that small numbers are preferentially represented to the left, whereas larger numbers are preferentially represented to the right, and thus is considered to reflect the left-to-right orientation of the mental representation of numbers (Dehaene, Bossini, & Giraux, 1993). Fourth, two recent studies demonstrated that children (Noël, 2005) and adults named numerical finger configurations faster when these configurations conformed to their own finger-counting habit than when they did not. Canonical finger configurations were also reported to be reactivated when adults need to retrieve the result of simple arithmetic operations (Badets, Pesenti, & Olivier, 2010).…”

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 …”

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.…”