Processing of multi-digit additions in high math-anxious individuals: psychophysiological evidence

María Isabel Núñez-Peña, Macarena Suárez-Pellicioni

We investigated the time course of neural processing of multi-digit additions in high- (HMA) and low-math anxious (LMA) individuals. Seventeen HMA and 17 LMA individuals were presented with two-digit additions and were asked to perform a verification task. Behavioral data showed that HMA individuals were slower and more error prone than their LMA peers, and that incorrect solutions were solved more slowly and less accurately than correct ones. Moreover, HMA individuals tended to need more time and commit more errors when having to verify incorrect solutions than correct ones. ERPs time-locked to the presentation of the addends (calculation phase) and to the presentation of the proposed solution (verification phase) were also analyzed. In both phases, a P2 component of larger amplitude was found for HMA individuals than for their LMA peers. Because the P2 component is considered to be a biomarker of the mobilization of attentional resources toward emotionally negative stimuli, these results suggest that HMA individuals may have invested more attentional resources both when processing the addends (calculation phase) and when they had to report whether the proposed solution was correct or not (verification phase), as compared to their LMA peers. Moreover, in the verification phase, LMA individuals showed a larger late positive component (LPC) for incorrect solutions at parietal electrodes than their HMA counterparts. The smaller LPC shown by HMA individuals when verifying incorrect solutions suggests that these solutions may have been appeared more plausible to them than to their LMA counterparts.