With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated.
- Charles Darwin;
Although great philosophers, such as Aristotle and Descartes, already work on the idea of body and human mind are distinct and separated agents, the evolution and nature of the brain have another story to tell us and shorten the ties about the dualism.
Advances in educational neuroscience studies demonstrated that in the difficulty of numerical learning, playful games in counting and finger recognition are great facilitators.
The performances of some types indicators such as an ability to compute numbers and abstractions in an imaginary number line are intrinsically related to body movements.
Specific regions of the brain are responsible for performing the determined functions of humans, like vision, hearing, movement and complex thinking. The ability of mathematics also have their space with a special observation: they overlap regions that already exist a predetermined occupation in the brain. The following image is a study of Arsalidou and Tayloras [1] in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), similarly with Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS, other more practical equipment for behavioral tasks) data, with calculations tasks embedded which demonstrate regions activated in different contexts of mathematics:
They found that mental executions of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and other numerical tasks are related to the recent evolutionary areas of the brain, among these are frontal areas, areas of integration and others ancient areas such motor and visual.
Following the idea, the scientist Dr. Korbinian Moeller explores which body movements could help mathematics programs for a better learning performance. He started from the movements of the fingers [2].
Previous studies have shown that children from 9 to 14 years old have difficulties in arithmetic carry deficiencies psychomotor and tactile perceptions. One of body movements associated was finger gnosis an ability to perceive and differentiate your own fingers without visual feedback, it was repeatedly observed with basic numerical competencies indicating the importance of fingers in the cognitive processing of numbers.
The "embodied numerosity” brings a sense of mathematics is rooted in the sensory and corporal experiences of finger usage, leading to a cognition incorporated with the body. When children are learning their first numbers and a computation, studies have already shown that they use their fingers to assist, implicitly suggesting that this systematic use of the finger could be beneficial for learning ordinal numbers and their cardial meaning [3].
In this context, Moeller used an experiment that tested finger gnosis. The hands separated and together in several trials had been put into a box so the child was no longer able to see his or her finger(s), whereas the experimenter on the other side of the box could touch the respective finger(s). The fingers were touched in different patterns and the child had informed not only the touched finger, but also in which order was touched. Performance successes were added points for multi-variable statistical analysis comparing different child’s capabilities as memory work, general cognitive abilities, short-term verbal memory, addition, subtraction, age, gender, short-term visual memory, estimation of numerical errors and numerical precursor skills.
The study emphasize the importance of fingers in the cognitive processing of numbers. Your finds continued the argumentation of the fingers have a crucial role in the development of the child for your numerical learning capacity. For sum and subtraction contexts, the fingers are excellent indicators, indeed cannot be used as a diagnostic form for a general context of arithmetic that involve others cognitive processes. These finds date the year 2015. In more recent studies [4] Moeller demonstrates a validation of embodied cognition based on training of body movements through the space associated with numerical numbers contexts on screens. The studies bring good prospects in improving different levels of math skills.
Therefore, embodied cognition brings a range of new possibilities where teach math maybe cannot be obtained only on the blackboard and paper, but also in physical education courtyards.
References:
[1] Marie Arsalidou, Margot J. Taylor, Is 2+2=4? Meta-analyses of brain areas needed for numbers and calculations,NeuroImage,Volume 54, Issue 3, 2011.
[2] Mirjam Wasner, Korbinian Moeller et al,Finger gnosis predicts a unique but small part of variance in initial arithmetic performance, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Volume 146, 2016.
[3] Related but not the same: Ordinality, cardinality and 1-to-1 correspondence in finger-based numerical representations, Mirjam Wasner et al, Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 2014.
[4] Applying embodied cognition: from useful interventions and their theoretical underpinnings to practical applications, Korbinian Moeller et al, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, ZDM Mathematics Education, 2017.
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