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Cultural similarities and specificities of finger counting and montring: evidence from Amazon Tsimane’ people

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posted on 2023-08-22, 13:57 authored by Krzysztof CiporaKrzysztof Cipora, Venera Gashaj, Annabel S Gridley, Mojtaba Soltanlou, Hans-Christoph Nuerk

Numerical cognition might be embodied, that is, grounded in bodily actions. This claim is supported by the observation that, potentially due to our shared biology, finger counting is prevalent among a variety of cultures. Differences in finger counting are apparent even within Western cultures. Relatively few indigenous cultures have been systematically analyzed in terms of traditional finger counting and montring (i.e., communicating numbers with fingers) routines. Even fewer studies used the same protocols across cultures, allowing for a systematic comparison of indigenous and Western finger counting routines. We analyze the finger counting and montring routines of Tsimane' (N = 121), an indigenous people living in the Bolivian Amazon rainforest, depending on handedness, education level, and exposure to mainstream, industrialized Bolivian culture. Tsimane' routines are compared with those of German and British participants. Tsimane' reveal a greater variation in finger counting and montring routines, which seems to be modified by their education level. We outline a framework on how different factors such as handedness and reading direction might affect cross-cultural and within-cultural variation in finger counting.

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Mathematics Education Centre

Published in

Acta Psychologica

Volume

239

Publisher

Elsevier

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The authors

Publisher statement

This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Acceptance date

2023-08-08

Publication date

2023-08-14

Copyright date

2023

ISSN

0001-6918

eISSN

1873-6297

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Krzysztof Cipora. Deposit date: 8 August 2023

Article number

104009

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