Number-space associations in synaesthesia are not influenced by finger-counting habits

Abstract

In many cultures, one of the earliest representations of number to be learned is a finger-counting system. Although most children stop using their fingers to count as they grow more confident with number, traces of this system can still be seen in adulthood. For example, an individual's finger-counting habits appear to affect the ways in which numbers are implicitly associated with certain areas of space, as inferred from the spatial–numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect. In this study, we questioned the finger-counting habits of 98 participants who make explicit, idiosyncratic associations between number and space, known as number-space synaesthesia. Unexpectedly, neither handedness nor finger-counting direction (left-to-right or right-to-left) was associated with the relative positions of 1 and 10 in an individual's number-space synaesthesia. This lack of association between finger-counting styles and number-space synaesthesia layout may result from habitual use of synaesthetic space rather than fingers when learning to count; we offer some testable hypotheses that could assess whether this is the case.

Keywords:

• Embodiment
• Manumerical cognition
• Number
• Synaesthesia

Our thanks to Kate Cross, Andy Mealor and two anonymous reviewers for providing feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Our thanks to Kate Cross, Andy Mealor and two anonymous reviewers for providing feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Notes

¹ Fischer (2008), Lindemann et al. (2011) and Tschentscher et al. (2012) have all used this questionnaire method to assess finger-counting habits and report it to be both valid and reliable.