Counting on your fingers may feel natural but it is not innate or universal; methods are culturally transmitted (like number lines) and may have an effect on cognition. A Guardian blog post asks you to “without thinking about it too much, use your hands to count to 10”. How did you do it?
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The number line is not an intuitive concept
Some cognitive scientists have done an experiment on some people in Papua New Guinea to test the hypothesis that the number line is based on an in-built intuition that all humans share. They concluded that it isn’t, and that you can use cardinal numbers without placing them mentally on a line.