Working memory task choice in future studies focusing on arithmetic, finger counting and working memory
Finger counting while calculating, also known as finger use, was shown to be associated with arithmetic attainment in young children (Jordan et al., 2008). Working memory (WM) shares a relation with both arithmetic and finger counting, but more research is needed to determine how WM impacts the relation between finger use and arithmetic (Dupont-Boime & Thevenot, 2018; Crollen et Noël, 2015). Hence, studies focusing on the relation between finger use and arithmetic would benefit from concurrently investigating WM.
However, this investigation implies choosing a WM task both appropriate to young children and coherent with finger use observation and arithmetic items. Since complex WM tasks are more related to math than simple ones (Allen et al., 2020), the present study focuses on three complex WM tasks. Previously used in numerical cognition studies, these tasks were selected because one requires gestures and another one numbers, whereas the latter does not require gestures or numbers.
The Corsi backward, the digit backward, and the animal span tasks (Gimbert et al., 2019), adapted from the color-naming span task (Camos & Barouillet, 2011), were administered to children from 4 to 7 years old (N=67). Finger use was observed during arithmetic and story problems. The data have not yet been analyzed.
The purpose of the present study is twofold: firstly, to differentiate the three selected WM tasks using principal component analysis; secondly, to determine which of these WM tasks explains the most arithmetic variance in regression models including finger use as a predictor and controlling for age.
Keywords: working memory, finger counting, arithmetic, story problems