The Relationships Among Working Memory, Math Anxiety, and Performance

Individuals with high math anxiety demonstrated smaller working memory spans, especially when assessed with a computation-based span task. This reduced working memory capacity led to a pronounced increase in reaction time and errors when mental addition was performed concurrently with a memory load...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. General 2001-06, Vol.130 (2), p.224-237
Main Authors: Ashcraft, Mark H, Kirk, Elizabeth P
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Anxiety
Anxiety - psychology
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive Processes
Educational Status
Female
Human
Human Channel Capacity
Humans
Individual Differences
Individuality
Male
Mathematics
Mathematics Anxiety
Mathematics education
Memory
Mental Recall
Problem Solving
Psychology
Reaction Time
Short Term Memory
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Summary:Individuals with high math anxiety demonstrated smaller working memory spans, especially when assessed with a computation-based span task. This reduced working memory capacity led to a pronounced increase in reaction time and errors when mental addition was performed concurrently with a memory load task. The effects of the reduction also generalized to a working memory-intensive transformation task. Overall, the results demonstrated that an individual difference variable, math anxiety, affects on-line performance in math-related tasks and that this effect is a transitory disruption of working memory. The authors consider a possible mechanism underlying this effect-disruption of central executive processes-and suggest that individual difference variables like math anxiety deserve greater empirical attention, especially on assessments of working memory capacity and functioning.
ISSN:0096-3445
1939-2222
DOI:10.1037/0096-3445.130.2.224