

Abacus fits the limits of human cognition -David Barner (Professor at UCSD and a co-author in the study)
Dear Readers,
The fascinating technology that we unearth today predates the invention of glass and even alphabets. Cue: it's beads in a frame. And we still use it.
Abacus
Did someone say maths? I know! How many of us are afraid of numbers and arithmetic? So much so that despite its implication, statistics in social sciences becomes the most frightening subject and most of us get confronted with mathematics anxiety. You must be thinking what on earth possessed me to write something on complex computations?
However, today's piece is not just math, but the cognitive skills involved with performing calculations in the head.
In 2015, a nine-year-old girl became a champion in Super Brain. Mere seconds were given to contenders to solve arithmetic that an average adult would use a calculator to find solution: to multiply two seven-digit numbers. The lightning speed calculation of Rinne Tsujikubo's left everyone astonished, even her teammate, Sasano, a Guinneas World Record holder for addition of 15 three-digit numbers in 1.7 seconds.
How did she do that? Manipulating visualisation of a very ancient tool, an abacus, the first calculator ever created.
Most of us usually solve a math problem by holding information in our mind. For example, to solve 13*8, we are required to hold the answer for 3*8 in the mind, and then further multiply to get the answer to the original problem. Even for calculations such as subtractions or addition, we are required to keep a track of multiple digits while borrowing or carrying a digit to get results. And when it comes to longer arithmetic, we take retreat to a device.
However, Rinne possesses an extraordinary computation ability. Abacus-based mental calculation (AMC) is an ability to perform blazing fast and accurate computations by manipulating a mental image of abacus in the mind. Questions about abacus-based mental calculation and the extraordinary ability has been gaining attention among researchers.
In a longitudinal study published in 2016 in Child Development, Learning Mathematics in a Visuospatial Format: A Randomised, Controlled Trial of Mental Abacus Instruction tested whether the expertise of Mental Abacus(i) can be acquired in standard classroom settings; (ii) improves the mathematical abilities of students; and (iii) is associated with cognitive capacities such as working memory.
As it is seen on the graph (check box above), students with Mental Abacus training outperformed, and made significant improvements in their mathematical skills than the control group.
Mathematics outcome measures for the two intervention conditions, plotted by study year (with 0 being pre-intervention). Error bars show 95% confidence intervals computed by nonparametric bootstrap. MA = mental abacus; WIAT = Wechsler Individual Achievement Test. (Barner et al., 2016).
For the study, researchers recruited 204 primary school students between the age of 5-7 years. Students were randomly assigned to two groups – MA (Mental Abacus) and control. For every week, from 2010 to 2013, both groups received 3 hours a week additional instruction. MA group received instruction on physical and mental abacus, whereas the other group received supplemental mathematics training.
Consecutively, the findings suggest that Mental Abacus training given to students enhanced the arithmetic ability than their counterparts who received supplemental training in standard mathematics. The Mental Abacus group outperformed their peers. Simply learning to use physical abacus affected the aptitude of students as it relies on visuospatial resources for storing and maintaining the visualisation of abacus during calculations.
There have been several studies exploring the ability associated with mental abacus, but this study is distinct. Most of the studies are constrained by laboratory settings whereas this study trained ordinary students in a standard classroom setting in a Vadodara school. This shows that abacus training can successfully be implemented in schools. Such findings can be of great help to design practical interventions in school learning.
Interestingly, they did not find any significant difference in cognitive abilities of the students. Instead, their findings suggest that students who developed Mental Expertise faster were mediated by their preexisting cognitive abilities. To say that students who possessed better spatial working memory may have reaped more benefits from the training to attain the extraordinary expertise. Contrary to this finding, a review published in 2020 in Frontiers in Neuroscience highlighted that Abacus-based Mental Calculations can enhance various cognitive faculties such as working memory, numerical magnitude processing and mathematics.
Such superior performance and cognitive skills are also enhanced by several other trainings such as learning music and playing chess. Practicing these skills for a longer duration have also been found to contribute to working memory, executive control, and reasoning.
But for precisely mental calculation skill, abacus remains as one of the most prominent tool. The magic is mostly done by the beads – which is then manipulated in the form of mental image with the help of spatial working memory. Abacus training may even lead to behavioural improvement in the visuospatial network and problem solving. With this, many researchers' sides with the argument that the operationalisation of abacus-based mental calculation entangles various fragments of working memory and with prolonged intensive training, can therefore produces a transfer effect. These findings are supported by an increasingly growing literature on mental abacus and working memory.
Undoubtedly, there remains various open-ended questions and possibilities to be explored with manipulation of imaginary abacus. Despite that, abacus-based learning has been shown to influence the visuospatial sketchpad that stores and maintains the visual and spatial information in the brain. With abacus-based mental calculation, an individual temporarily stores imaginary beads in the vision and manipulates their spatial location to compute. And while mental abacus harnesses from mind and visualisation, it would indeed be of great help to see how it enhances a blind persons' cognitive skill in performing computations.
Can you be an abacist?
For this, one is required to do intellectual powerlifting with mental abacus. Rinee performed seamless manipulation of an imaginary abacus, where she envisioned the abacus in her mind and cracked the problem. For this, an individual requires intense training and continuously challenge several cognitive processes while carrying out the computation. This may also wield transfer of skills to other cognitive abilities such as construction and formation of visuospatial mental images.

“Behavioural Science” in India has grown and diversified out of various other applied fields in the last decade of its existence in India, in its current form. Of course, long before we began labelling there were researchers using Randomised Control Trials to ascertain the optimum scale and impact of welfare programmes, along with a highly intuitive and creative advertising and consumer marketing industry with a finger on the pulse of this giant, complex and confounding nation, among other initiatives that applied behavioural insights without much thought on theory or systems.
But with a global awakening to the power of behaviourally informed programmes, policies, projects and products. India too began compiling and streamlining its efforts to apply the knowledge of behavioural principles to achieve its various development and transformation objectives. As we enter an era of ubiquitous adoption of behavioural science across fields and disciplines, the question of what it is, what is still required and where it's headed arises. For this, we turn to Dilip Soman - a Behavioural Science practitioner turned academic, dedicated to exploring and explaining Behaviour Science in the Wild with some questions.
You can listen, or read the entire interview @ https://www.behavioural.in/interview/



Contribution by Fazli & Everyone @TBR