Abstract
Doing long sums in the absence of complementary actions or artefacts is a multistep procedure that quickly taxes working memory; congesting the phonological loop further handicaps performance. In the experiment reported here, participants completed long sums either with hands down – the low interactivity condition – or by moving numbered tokens – the high interactivity condition – while they repeated “the” continuously, loading the phonological loop, or not. As expected, interactivity and articulatory suppression substantially affected performance; critically, the effect of articulatory suppression was stronger in the low than in the high interactivity condition. In addition, an independent measure of mathematics anxiety predicted the impact of articulatory suppression on performance only in the low (not high) interactivity condition. These findings suggest that interactivity augmented overall or systemic working memory resources and diminished the effect of mathematics anxiety, underscoring the importance of characterizing the properties of the system as it is configured by the dynamic agent-environment coupling
Highlights
Different components of working memory are engaged in doing long sums without external aids or complementary actions (Raghubar, Barnes, & Hecht, 2010)
We examined the role of interactivity in mitigating the impact of depleted working memory resources and mathematics anxiety on mental arithmetic performance
The sums in the low interactivity condition were presented with numbers that were 1 cm high and 0.5 cm wide, each number framed in a circle that was 2.5 cm in diameter; the tokens employed in the high interactivity condition were 2 cm in diameter and the digit inscribed on the tokens were 0.8 cm high and 0.4 cm wide
Summary
Different components of working memory are engaged in doing long sums without external aids or complementary actions (Raghubar, Barnes, & Hecht, 2010). Calculating the correct answer requires temporary storage and executive skills: interim totals are calculated and rehearsed sub-vocally, numbers tagged as having been added, others tagged as not, attention allocated to certain areas of the visual presentation or switched to others to identify what number or the easiest number to add and arithmetic knowledge retrieved from long-term memory to facilitate the identification of congenial subtotals. Complementary actions and interactivity The role of working memory in mental arithmetic is traditionally established with an experimental procedure that limits or prevents participants from modifying the problem presentation in working out an answer. Using a dual-task paradigm, Goldin-Meadow, Nusbaum, Kelly, and Wagner (2001) showed that participants perform better at a secondary memory task when gesturing while explaining how they solved a math problem (the primary task).
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