Math anxiety and developmental dyscalculia: A study on working memory processes

Abstract

Introduction: Although many children encounter difficulties in arithmetic, the underlying cognitive and emotive factors are still not fully understood. This study examined verbal and visuospatial short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) performance in children with developmental dyscalculia (DD) and high mathematics anxiety (MA) compared with typically developing (TD) children. Method: Groups were matched on reading comprehension performance and IQ as well as on general anxiety. We aimed to test whether children with DD and MA were differently impaired in verbal and visuospatial STM and WM. Children were individually tested with four computerized tasks: two STM tasks (forward verbal and visuospatial recall) and two WM tasks (backward verbal and visuospatial recall). Results: Relative to children with TD, those with DD did not show impairments on the forward or backward verbal tasks, but showed specific impairments in the visuospatial WM task. In contrast, children with MA were particularly impaired in the verbal WM task. Conclusions: Knowing the underlying cognitive processes that differentiate why children with DD and MA fail in math could have both educational and clinical implications.

Keywords:

• Developmental dyscalculia
• Mathematics anxiety
• Short-term memory
• Working memory

Notes

¹ It is worth noting that in Italy there are not special classes, and the individualized educational plan (IEP) is given to children with intellectual disability or autism spectrum disorder who do not follow the same education program as that of other children with the same chronological age. Children with very low socioeconomic status (SES) have been excluded as it is an exclusion criterion for a diagnosis of developmental dyscalculia; hence, to have matched groups of children we decided to exclude them from our analyses.

Additional information

Funding

This project has been funded by the Nuffield Foundation (D.S.), although the views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Foundation (www.nuffieldfoundation.org). The project has also been funded by the James S. McDonnel Foundation (D.S.).