Selected Article
June 2001 Vol. 130, No. 2, 224-237
© 2001 by the American Psychological Association
The
Relationships Among Working Memory, Math Anxiety, and Performance
Mark
H. Ashcraft and Elizabeth P. Kirk
Department of Psychology
Cleveland State University
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.