Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Finger gnosis (the ability to identify which finger has beentouched) and magnitude comparison (the ability to determinewhich of two numbers is larger) are surprisingly correlated.We present a spiking neuron model of a common componentthat could be used in both tasks: an array of pointers. Weshow that if the model's single tuned parameter is set to matchhuman accuracy performance in one task, then it also matcheson the other task (with the exception of one data point). Thisprovides a novel explanation of the relation, and proposes acommon component that could be used across cognitive tasks.