Atti del X Convegno Annuale AISC 2013 NEAScience ANNO 1 - VOL.2 ISSN-2282 6009 111 Fingers, words and counting in a cognitive robot Vivian M. De La Cruz Dip. di SCFSC, Università di Messina, Italia vdelacruz@unime.it Alessandro Di Nuovo Centre for Robotics and Neural Syst., Plymouth University, UK Fac. di Ingegneria e Architettura, Università di Enna "Kore", Italia alessandro.dinuovo@plymouth.ac.uk Santo Di Nuovo Dip. dei Processi Formativi, Università di Catania, Italia s.dinuovo@unict.it 1. Introduction Quite recently, the topic of finger based number knowledge has seen a surge of new interest, especially from embodied cognition perspec- tives (for a recent special issue on the topic see Fischer et al. 2012). In- creasing evidence coming from developmental as well as neurocogni- tive studies, has in fact, suggested that finger counting activity plays an important role in the acquisition of numerical skills in children. It has been claimed to help build motor-based representations of number that continue to influence number processing well into adulthood (Domahs et al., 2010), facilitating the emergence of number concepts from senso- rimotor experience through a bottom-up process (Andres et al., 2008).