Mathematics using multiple senses: Developing finger gnosis with three- and four-year-olds in an era of multi-touch technologies

Abstract

In this paper, we explore a richer sense of finger gnosis (finger knowledge) with respect to three- and four-year-olds’ interactions with a novel iPad application (TouchCounts), focusing on their responses to an “inverse subitising” task. The direct and tactile nature of their engagement with TouchCounts leads to a striking shift from incrementing using the index finger to deployment of several fingers all-at-once (in a cardinal touch gesture) to achieve a given target number that is then spoken by the iPad. This form of finger representation differs from the more ordinally-based differentiation of fingers that is discussed in the psychology literature.