Journal of Cognitive Psychology

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Frequency of finger looking during finger counting

is related to children's working memory capacities

Anne-Françoise de Chambrier, Catherine Thevenot, Pierre Barrouillet &

Pascal Zesiger

To cite this article: Anne-Françoise de Chambrier, Catherine Thevenot, Pierre Barrouillet

& Pascal Zesiger (2018) Frequency of finger looking during finger counting is related to
children's working memory capacities, Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 30:5-6, 503-510, DOI:
10.1080/20445911.2018.1502190

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2018.1502190

Published online: 22 Jul 2018.

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JOURNAL OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
2018, VOL. 30, NOS. 5–6, 503–510
https://doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2018.1502190

Frequency of finger looking during finger counting is related to children’s

working memory capacities
Anne-Françoise de Chambriera, Catherine Thevenotb, Pierre Barrouilletc and Pascal Zesigerc
a
Special Needs Education Unit, University of Teacher Education from State of Vaud, Lausanne, Switzerland; bInstitute of Psychology,
University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland; cFaculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva,
Switzerland

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Finger counting can be useful in solving arithmetic problems, noticeably because it Received 20 July 2017
reduces the working memory demand of mental calculations. However, proprioceptive Accepted 9 July 2018
information might not be sufficient to keep track of the number of fingers raised
KEYWORDS
during problem solving, and visual input may play an important role in this process. Numerical cognition; mental
The present study was designed to address this question and shows that 8-year-old arithmetic; arithmetic
children look at their fingers in 60% of the trials during finger counting when solving strategies; finger use;
additive problems. Moreover, our results reveal that the frequency of finger looking is working memory
negatively correlated with working memory capacities and is higher for more difficult
problems. These findings suggest that finger looking is recruited in managing the
cognitive demand of the arithmetic task, probably by providing additional external
cues to monitor the number of steps that have to be incremented during finger counting.

Introduction
Arithmetic skill development in children has been
widely studied over the past four decades, and,
more recently, a link between fingers and number
processing has been established (Berteletti &
Booth, 2016 for a review). The use of fingers in
numerical tasks does not seem mandatory for the
acquisition of good numerical skills (Crollen, Mahe,
Collignon, & Seron, 2011), but may provide useful
support to children during the first steps of arith-
metic learning (e.g. Butterworth, 1999; Wasner,
Moeller, Fisher, & Nuerk, 2014).
Indeed, during the first developmental stages of
arithmetic strategies, children often rely on counting
procedures involving fingers (Geary & Burlingham-
Dubree, 1989; Siegler & Robinson, 1982). For
example, when solving additive problems, they
initially use the “counting all” procedure, which con-
sists of representing both operands on fingers and
counting all of them (Fuson, 1982; Siegler &
Shrager, 1984). Then, they progressively adopt strat-
egies in which they count from one of the addends.
Children can count from the first operand (for 3 + 5,
“4, 5, 6, 7, 8”) or directly use the more sophisticated
and less demanding “min” procedure whereby they
start to count from the largest addend (for 3 + 5, “6,
7, 8”) (Groen & Parkman, 1972; Svenson, 1975). The
min procedure becomes predominant during the
first grade and is supported by the use of fingers
up to the second grade or beyond (Geary, Hoard,
Byrd-Craven, & Catherine DeSoto, 2004; Lecointre,
Lépine, & Camos, 2005; Ostad, 1997).
The use of finger counting is very commonly
considered as helping children to keep track of
the counting and calculation steps, and, conse-
quently, helps them to release a part of the signifi-
cant working memory load inherent in counting
tasks (Alibali & DiRusso, 1999; Crollen & Noël,
2015; Geary, 1994). Indeed, counting procedures
involve both maintaining partial information and
processing new information, which is particularly
demanding. More precisely, during counting tasks,
children have to recite the verbal numerical
sequence while coordinating and monitoring the
number of steps that have to be incremented
and, at the same time, they have to remember
the problem to be solved (Noël, Seron, & Trovarelli,
2004). The high cognitive cost of this counting pro-
cedure can be relieved by physically instantiating
the quantities to be added. In this way, fingers

CONTACT Anne-Françoise de Chambrier anne-francoise.de-chambrier@hepl.ch

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
504 A.-F. DE CHAMBRIER ET AL.
constitute ideal tools for endorsing a part of this
cognitive demand because they can act as incre-
mental external counters (Alibali & DiRusso, 1999;
Costa et al., 2011; Crollen & Noël, 2015). In line
with this, many studies showed that from the
middle of the primary school, children with lower
working memory use finger counting more fre-
quently (Geary, 1993; Geary et al., 2004; Barrouillet
& Lépine, 2005). Moreover, Berteletti and Booth
(2015) demonstrated that activation in finger
motor areas increased with the size of the pro-
blems to solve, and so with the number of steps
required to solve the problems. According to
many researchers (LeFevre, DeStefano, Coleman, &
Shanahan, 2005), the number of steps required to
solve the problems represents a variation in com-
plexity that is linked to working memory
demands. For example, Hecht (2002) found, on pro-
blems up to 8 + 9 solved by min counting, that the
more counts had to be made, the more the sec-
ondary tasks disrupting central executive caused
interference. Thus, the higher somatosensory acti-
vation found by Berteletti and Booth (2015) in
finger motor areas for larger problems is inter-
preted as a greater reliance on finger counting
when the size of the problems – and therefore
when the working memory load – increase. Still,
in order to benefit from the use of fingers as exter-
nal place-holders, children need to know the exact
number of fingers already raised and of those still
to be raised, which is not necessarily possible in a
purely proprioceptive way.
Therefore, looking at fingers could constitute an
important source of information for accurate finger
counting. This is supported by a series of studies
showing that children and adults are quicker to
determine the number of fingers raised when
they are presented in a canonical rather than an
atypical configuration (Di Luca & Pesenti, 2008;
Lafay, Thevenot, Castel, & Fayol, 2013; Noël, 2005;
Thevenot et al., 2014). This ability to better identify
finger patterns as they are commonly seen pro-
vides supporting evidence for the visual com-
ponent of finger representations. Even more in
line with the objective of the current study,
recent research involving blind individuals have
suggested that visual input may play a critical
role in the development of finger counting.
Indeed, Crollen et al. (2011) showed that although
blind and sighted children achieve similar levels
of counting and finger discrimination, blind chil-
dren use finger counting less spontaneously and
less conventionally than their sighted peers. Fur-
thermore, Crollen et al. (2014) found that, relative
to sighted and late-blind participants, early-blind
individuals are not affected by hand movement
interference in an enumeration task. In sighted par-
ticipants, this disruption is interpreted within a
functional framework which assumes that finger
counting constitutes one of the bases for the
development of counting and arithmetic (Crollen
& Noël, 2015; Michaux, Masson, Pesenti, & Andres,
2013). The lack of interference between hand
movements and enumeration performance in
early blind individuals suggests that finger count-
ing is not as important for them in their develop-
ment of numerical skills. This might precisely be
due to their impossibility to see their fingers
while counting. Conversely, late blind and controls
are affected by hand-motor interference probably
because developmental vision allows to implement
the close connection between fingers and count-
ing. The authors also underline that early blindness
does not prevent individuals to have numerical
skills that are similar to the other groups. As a con-
clusion, these studies show that while vision and
finger counting are not mandatory to have good
numerical skills, visual cues provide an important
interface allowing fingers to act as a valuable tool
in counting (Crollen et al., 2014). In fact, and as
suggested by Crollen et al. (2011), the role of
fingers in relieving working memory load during
arithmetic calculations could in part be owed to
finger looking. Dormal, Crollen, Baumans, Lepore,
and Collignon (2016) even suggest that blind indi-
viduals compensate for the lack of visual cues
during arithmetic by their enhanced working
memory abilities.
Therefore, and conversely, poor working memory
resources should lead to an increased need for visual
input during finger counting. Thus, arithmetic pro-
blems that are especially demanding should also
elicit higher frequencies of finger looking than
easier problems. In order to test these assumptions,
and to better understand the role of finger looking
during finger counting, we observed second
graders’ strategies and performance in a single-
digit addition task. We selected second graders
because we know that finger counting frequency
increases up to the Fall of the second grade
(Jordan, Kaplan, Ramineni, & Locuniak, 2008). Chil-
dren’s working memory skills were assessed using
the counting span and the listening span tasks. We
predicted that finger looking frequency would be

inversely related to working memory capacity, and
would positively correlate with problem complexity.
Method
Participants
Fifty-eight children (34 boys) aged 7 years and 9
months on average (SD = 0;3; range from 7;0 to
8;8) were recruited in three different French-speak-
ing elementary mainstream schools. The selected
schools were composed of mixed-class families.
Material
The data were collected as a part of a larger study on
the cognitive processes associated to arithmetic
skills. The other tasks administered within this
larger study were phonological awareness and
number magnitude tasks. Only the tasks that were
used for the current research question are detailed
below.
Arithmetic task
The original task comprised 50 single-digit additions
with operands ranging from 2 to 9. Ties and pro-
blems with sums up to 10 were excluded from the
analyses of the present study because they were
mainly solved using covert strategies and rarely
involved finger use. Thus, the analyses were con-
ducted on the remaining 24 addition problems
with sums >10, thereby giving rise to a substantial
amount of finger-counting. These 24 addition pro-
blems were presented into two separate sets of 12
problems rigorously matched by problem size and
by the number of problems having the larger
operand first (see Appendix). Half of the children
were presented with the first set and the other
half with the second set.
The problems were aurally presented through the
computer loudspeakers (ProBook 4510s). This aural
presentation was chosen so that the eyes of children
were more free than in a condition in which the pro-
blems are visually presented on a screen. Answers
had to be given orally. One practice item preceded
the test phase. Children were asked to respond as
correctly and as quickly as possible, and it was
emphasised that they could solve the problems
any way they wanted. The computer was on a
table, in front of which children were slightly taken
away, in order to let them the opportunity to look
at their fingers when using them beneath. In order
JOURNAL OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY 505
to identify the arithmetic strategies used, children
were video-recorded while performing the tasks.
The experimenter was on the left side of the children
and the camera was positioned at two metres in the
diagonal front-right of them in order to see whether
they used finger-counting and if so, whether they
looked at them. The camera was positioned on a
tripod at one metre high, in order to film whether
children used their fingers even under the table.
The experimenter coded, during the task and later
through the videos, how fingers were used. The
finger counting strategies were classified as “min”,
“counting from the first” or “counting all”; and as
“with” or “without finger looking”. Finger looking
was coded binary in terms of presence or absence
per trial. Trials in which fingers were looked at
least once, even briefly, were considered as trials
with finger looking and coded 1. A second exper-
imenter, blind to the conditions, watched 10% of
the 696 trials and had to note if she could detect
finger counting. Where appropriate, she had to
note where the counting began (form the larger
operand, from the smaller operand or from one) as
well as if finger looking was used. The inter-rater
reliability was very high, r(56) = .889, p < .001.
Finger counting and finger looking frequencies
were averaged across the problems.
Working memory tasks
Working memory was assessed using the counting
span and the listening span tasks. In the counting
span task, children had to count the red dots
amongst red and blue dots on a computer screen.
There were from two to nine targeted red dots on
each screen. At the end of a series of screens, chil-
dren had to recall in the correct order the totals
reached in the series. In the listening span task, chil-
dren were required to determine whether aurally
presented sentences were true or false while
remembering their last word (e.g. “dogs drink
water” or “flowers make noise”). At the end of a
series of sentences, children had to repeat the last
word of each sentence in the correct order. For
both tasks, three series with the same number of
items were provided, and the number of items in
the series progressively increased from 2 to 6
(three series of two screen/sentences, three series
of three screens/sentences, three series of four
screen/sentences … up to three series of six
screens/sentences). For both tasks, two series of
two items were administered as a practice trial.
Both tasks ended when the child failed to recall
506 A.-F. DE CHAMBRIER ET AL.
Table 1. Mean reaction time, mean accuracy, range and
group differences for the two sets of problems.
Set 1 Set 2
Mean RT 6.12 (1.44) 6.5 (1.49)
Range 3.88–9.22 4.42–9.56
Mean accuracy 89.7% (12.7) 88.2% (11.7)
Range 58–100% 58–100%
two series of a given length. One point was attribu-
ted for each correctly recalled series.
Procedure
The arithmetic and working memory tasks were
administered individually to the children in the
same session. The experiment took place at the
middle of the second grade (December – January).
All the participants had written consent signed by
their parents and the study obtained the agreement
of the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Psychology
and Educational Sciences at the University of
Geneva.
Results
First, Table 1 displays the descriptive statistics and
differences for the two sets of 12 problems that
were administered each to half of the children. As
can be seen, the two sets of problems gave rise to
very similar results and consecutive analyses were
computed on the scores averaged across the two
sets.
The percentage of correct responses in the
addition task was high (88%). In all the trials the
mean percentage of finger counting was 48%, but
16 children (out of 58) never used their fingers.
When children counted on their fingers, they
mainly used the “min” strategy (83%). In contrast,
the “counting from the first addend” strategy was
used in only 6% of the trials and the “counting all”
strategy in 11% of the trials. The 42 children who
used their fingers at least once looked at them in
60% of the problems on average. Seven children
never looked at their fingers, 13 of them always
looked at them, and 22 children only looked at
them for some of the trials (ranging from 10% to
91% of the finger counting trials).
In order to test the presence of a relationship
between the variables of interest, the analyses of
Pearson’s correlations were complemented by
1
http://pcl.missouri.edu/bayesfactor
Table 2. Correlations between finger looking frequency,
working memory and finger counting frequency (N = 58
t (27) p except for finger looking, N = 42).
.99 .88 1 2 3
1. Finger looking – −.40** .09
.45 .54 2. Working memory - −.22
3. Finger counting –
Significance threshold have been adjusted using a Bonferroni correc-
tion, **p < .008.
calculating a Bayes Factor (BF), which computes a
weighted average likelihood ratio that indicates
the relative plausibility of the data under the two
competing hypotheses (i.e. r equals 0 versus r
different from 0; for more information about the
advantages of a Bayesian Factor over standard fre-
quentist tests regarding correlations, see Wetzels &
Wagenmakers, 2012). A BF value above 1, as calcu-
lated by the online available calculator of the Univer-
sity of Missouri,1 indicates how many times the data
are as likely to have occurred under the alternative
hypothesis than under the null hypothesis, and the
degree of support can be interpreted according to
Jeffreys scale (1961).
Correlational analyses are displayed in Table 2.
For the working memory capacity measure, in
order to obtain a more reliable score that captures
more common factor and that is less dependent to
the material, we combined the scores obtained in
the counting span and the listening span tasks,
which strongly correlated, r(56) = .48, p < .001, BF =
168.28. As expected, finger looking frequency nega-
tively correlated with working memory capacity, r
(40) = −.40, p = .008, BF = 5.51 (see Figure 1). It is
worth raising that finger looking correlated more
strongly with the counting span task (r(40) = −.411,
p = .007, BF = 6.62) but also marginally with the lis-
tening span task (r(40) = −.291, p = .062, BF = 1.29).
Interestingly, finger counting did not correlate sig-
nificantly with working memory capacity, r(56) =
−.22, p = .10, BF = 0.86, nor with finger looking, r
(40) = −.09, p = .57, BF = 0.34.
In order to test whether finger counting and
finger looking frequencies increased with the cogni-
tive load of the problems as measured by the
number of steps required to solve the problem,
and given that most finger counting strategies con-
sisted of incrementing the steps from the larger
addend (i.e. min strategy), the size of the smaller
addend was entered in an item-level analyses. It
appeared that the frequency of both finger

Figure 1. Scatterplot illustrating the correlation between finger looking frequency (Y axis) and working memory skills (X axis).
counting, r(22) = .55, p = .006, BF = 8.21, and finger
looking, r(22) = .56, p = .005, BF = 9.49 (see Figure
2), increased with the size of the smaller addend.
Discussion
It is already well documented that finger counting
can relieve the working memory load associated
with the execution of mental arithmetic operations
(e.g. Crollen & Noël, 2015). In this study, we
studied the role finger looking might play during
finger counting and in releasing working memory
resource by testing if finger looking was related to
working memory resource and load. To this end,
we observed the behaviour of second graders in
an addition task and tested their working memory
capacity.
First, our results indicate that almost half of one-
digit additions (i.e. 48%) with a sum above 10 are
solved by second graders with the help of fingers.
Moreover, when finger counting is used, children
look at their fingers in 60% of the trials. Interestingly,
most of the children who look at their fingers during
finger counting do not use this strategy systemati-
cally for all problems, which shows that finger
looking is not a rigid personal habit.
Concerning the relationship between finger
looking and working memory capacity, our results
are in line with our predictions and reveal a
JOURNAL OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY 507
modest, but significant negative correlation
between the two variables. In other words, among
the children who use their fingers to solve additions
in at least one problem, those with lower working
memory resources rely more often on finger
looking than children with higher capabilities. More-
over, and still in line with our predictions, we also
found a correlation between finger looking and
the size of the smaller addend, which determines
the working memory demand of the most fre-
quently used min strategy. An increase in size of
the smaller addend was indeed accompanied by
more frequent finger looking. To sum up, this
shows that when children’s working memory
resources are lower, or when the problems to be
solved are cognitively demanding, children more
often look at their fingers. In accordance with
Crollen et al. (2014), it thus appears that the visual
input during finger counting provides a good plat-
form to relieve the memory load of the task.
As regards the more precise nature of the role
finger looking might play in arithmetic, it is interest-
ing to note that there was a slight trend towards a
positive correlation between finger looking and
RTs (r(40) = .27, p = .084). That is, children who
looked more often at their fingers tended to solve
the problems slower. Accuracy on these rather
simple problems was too high to study its link with
finger looking. Moreover, it should be taken into
508 A.-F. DE CHAMBRIER ET AL.
Figure 2. Scatterplot illustrating the correlation between finger looking frequency (Y axis) and the size of the smaller operand
(X axis).
account at which point working memory could act
as a mediator within the links between finger
looking and arithmetic performance. At the current
state of the art, our interpretation is that finger
looking helps children in coping with the cognitive
demand of the task by providing, when needed,
additional external cues in order to adequately
monitor the number of steps to be incremented
during the counting procedure. However, relieving
cognitive load by looking at fingers does not necess-
arily improve performance and tends to be time
consuming, while it seems that children who
manage to solve the problems without looking at
their fingers are faster.
Indeed, it is possible that finger looking is
recruited when proprioceptive information is not
sufficient to monitor the finger counting process.
Interestingly, Noël (2005) showed that the relation-
ship between finger gnosia (i.e. finger perception
and discrimination) and arithmetic, which is com-
monly reported in the literature (Costa et al., 2011;
Fayol, Barrouillet, & Marinthe, 1998; Noël, 2005;
Reeve & Humberstone, 2011; but see Long et al.,
2016), is limited to small additions. Indeed, the cor-
relation between finger gnosia and performance is
no longer observed when the additions are con-
structed with operands ranging from 6 to 9. There-
fore, while finger gnosia appears to play a role in
the construction of accurate representations and
manipulations of small numbers on fingers, it
could be insufficient when larger numbers need to
be represented on fingers. In this case, finger
looking appears to be required to monitor the
finger counting process. Stated in another way,
when numerosities are too high to be recognised
and monitored through sensory-motor perceptions,
fingers seemingly need to be looked at in order to
act effectively as external incremental counters.
A last point that deserves discussion in the
context of our results is the absence of a significant
relationship between children’s working memory
capacity and the frequency of finger counting. It
could have been expected that children with more
limited working memory skills would have been
more likely to use their fingers in an arithmetic
task than children with higher capabilities.
However, this absence of relationship is consistent
with recent data showing that at the early beginning
of school (around 6 years), finger counting is posi-
tively correlated with working memory (Dupont-
Boime & Thevenot, 2018) as well as with numerical
performance (Jordan et al., 2008; Lafay et al., 2013).
Indeed, it is only later (around 8–9 years) that
finger counting is concomitant with poor working
memory skills and low arithmetical performance
(Geary et al., 2004; Jordan et al., 2008). Thus, the

time at which the current study took place (middle
of the second grade) appears to be the time at
which the relation between finger counting and
working memory resource is being reversed. Never-
theless, the role of fingers as a discharger of working
memory load is still attested by another of our
results showing a strong correlation between the
size of the smaller addend and finger counting fre-
quency. As expected, finger counting is therefore
more likely to be implemented when the problem
is difficult and the cognitive load of the task
increases (Noël et al., 2004).
To summarise, we have shown here that finger
looking is an important characteristic of finger
counting and seems to be recruited in order to alle-
viate the working memory load for arithmetic pro-
blems. Finger looking could operate as an
additional cue for monitoring the counting process
and confer to the fingers their place-holder value
during the solving process. These functions could
be especially important when internalised sensory-
motor perceptions are not sufficient for recognising
the numbers represented on fingers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the
authors.
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