title: Math anxiety: A review of its cognitive consequences, psychophysiological correlates, and brain bases.
abstract: A decade has passed since the last published review of math anxiety, which was carried out by Ashcraft and Ridley (2005). Given the considerable interest aroused by this topic in recent years and the growing number of publications related to it, the present article aims to provide a full and updated review of the field, ranging from the initial studies of the impact of math anxiety on numerical cognition, to the latest research exploring its electrophysiological correlates and brain bases from a cognitive neuroscience perspective. Finally, this review describes the factors and mechanisms that have been claimed to play a role in the origins and/or maintenance of math anxiety, and it examines in detail the main explanations proposed to account for the negative effects of math anxiety on performance: competition for working memory resources, a deficit in a low-level numerical representation, and inhibition/attentional control deficit.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Psychology and Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior (IR3C), University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Macarena
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Suárez-Pellicioni
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Psychology and Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior (IR3C), University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain. inunez@ub.edu.|Department of Behavioral Sciences Methodology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Barcelona, Passeig Vall d'Hebron, 171, 08035, Barcelona, Spain. inunez@ub.edu.
authors.forename: María Isabel
authors.initials: MI
authors.lastname: Núñez-Peña
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Psychology and Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior (IR3C), University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Àngels
authors.initials: À
authors.lastname: Colomé
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001007:Anxiety / Q000523:psychology*; D001008:Anxiety Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008433:Mathematics; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Attentional control deficit; Brain correlates; ERPs; Inhibitory deficit; Math anxiety; Numerical cognition; Numerical magnitude representation; Working memory; fMRI