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When errors count: an EEG study on numerical error monitoring under performance pressure

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An Erratum to this article was published on 01 April 2016

Abstract

In high-stake tests, students often display lower achievements than expected based on their skill level—a phenomenon known as choking under pressure. This imposes a serious problem for many students, especially for test-anxious individuals. Among school subjects, mathematics has been shown to be particularly vulnerable to choking. To succeed in a mathematics test, it is important to monitor ongoing responses, and to dynamically adapt to errors. However, it is largely unknown how academic pressure changes response monitoring and whether this depends on individual differences in test anxiety. In the present study, we aimed to start answering these questions by combining behavioral performance measurements with electroencephalography (EEG) indices of response monitoring. Eighteen participants performed a numerical Stroop task in two pressure scenarios: a high pressure condition modeling a real-life test situation and a low pressure control condition. While behavioral performance data provided mixed evidence, EEG indices suggested changed response monitoring in the high pressure condition as well as in relatively test-anxious participants. These findings highlight the role of response monitoring under academic performance pressure.

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Notes

  1. Only female participants were recruited since gender differences have been reported for both mathematics (Else-Quest et al. 2010) and test anxiety (Hembree 1988). To avoid possible confutations with stereotype threat effects (Nguyen and Ryan 2008) all experiments were conducted by a team of a female and a male examiner.

  2. The high pressure scenario used in the present study differed in some points from the scenario reported by Beilock and colleagues (e.g. Beilock et al. 2004). Since the participating psychology students in the present study were likely to be familiar with psychological experiments it seemed implausible to us to involve a cover story with confederates.

  3. In the notation of the linear mixed models used in the present manuscript, “+” indicates a main effect and “*” indicates an interaction term.

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Acknowledgments

The authors want to thank Anna Hinze and Isabel Müller for their help with data collection.

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Correspondence to Frieder L. Schillinger.

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Figure S1. Scatter plot of mean response times (A) and accuracy (B) as a function ofperformance pressure and test anxiety (raw values). Numbers indicate individual subjects.Linear regression lines were fitted for each pressure condition for illustrative purposesd. (PDF 853 kb)

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Schillinger, F.L., De Smedt, B. & Grabner, R.H. When errors count: an EEG study on numerical error monitoring under performance pressure. ZDM Mathematics Education 48, 351–363 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-015-0746-8

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