Psychological Development and Education ›› 2020, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (1): 10-18.doi: 10.16187/j.cnki.issn1001-4918.2020.01.02

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Math Anxiety Affects Children's Numerical Representation: Cognitive Inhibition as a Moderator

GUAN Dongxiao, AI Jiru, HUANG Bijuan, CUI Shuang, SI Jiwei   

  1. School of Psychology, Shandong Normal University, Jinan 250358
  • Published:2020-02-05

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Abstract: The current paper examined differences among children with different level of math anxiety in the processing of numerical magnitude under condition of inhibition and non-inhibition. 70 third graders, including 36 high math anxiety children (HMA) and 34 low math anxiety children (LMA), were employed and asked to accomplish symbolic numerical representation tasks and non-symbolic numerical representation tasks. The results showed that numerical distance effect was found in all participants. Compared to symbolic numerical representation tasks, the ACC of HMA children was lower than LMA children in non-symbolic numerical representation tasks, and the distance effect was larger for HMA group than for LMA group. Additionally, HMA had poorer performance in inhibition condition than LMA children. These findings suggested that math anxiety may not only affect difficult mathematical tasks, but simple numerical tasks. And the cognitive inhibition plays a regulatory role in this processing.

Key words: mathematics anxiety, cognitive inhibition, symbolic numerical representation, non-symbolic numerical representation, children

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