Math Anxiety – Dealing with Fear of Failure

Not everybody loves math. In fact, some people report tension, apprehension, and fear when faced with the need to perform mathematical tasks as a part of everyday life. Not surprisingly, these highly math anxious individuals (HMAs) perform more poorly on math related tasks than individuals with low math anxiety, tending to avoid math classes and math-related career paths. But, understanding more about the neural underpinnings of high math anxiety may help educators develop better strategies for counteracting these tendencies, ultimately opening the door to more diverse career opportunities for HMAs.
Recently, scientists have begun to understand the differences in neural activity that may partially underlie math anxiety. A 2012 study found that when individuals with math anxiety anticipate a math task, they display increased activity bilaterally in the dorso-posterior insula — a region of the brain associated with threat detection and often with the experience of pain itself.
Interestingly, this area did not remain activated during the math task itself: it appears as if the anticipation of math is the painful part, not the actual doing of it. The higher the degree of anxiety, the more this area of the brain appeared to be active. This mechanism helps explain why individuals with high math anxiety avoid math — just thinking about doing it is painful to them!
It’s worth noting that not all individuals with high math anxiety perform poorly on math tasks relative to those with low math anxiety. A 2011 study showed that some individuals with high math anxiety showed increased activity in the inferior frontoparietal regions of the brain relative to individuals with low math anxiety; these same individuals were the ones most likely to perform relatively well on math tasks, even though they were anxious.
This area of the brain includes regions thought to be involved in cognitive control and in dealing with negative emotions in a logical way. In those with high math anxiety, both high performers and low performers showed similar activity in areas of the brain associated with a fear response. Both groups also showed similar activity in regions associated with mathematical calculations. Thus the researchers concluded that the individuals’ cognitive response to their own anxiety may be the most important factor in determining their ultimate performance.

These findings may be used to shape educational strategies for high math anxiety students. The most successful strategies may not be ones that seek to eliminate the anxiety outright. Instead, it may be more effective for educators to teach these students how to utilize their own inner cognitive controls to mitigate the math-anxiety response when it happens — before it has a chance to decrease actual math performance. These individuals might not like doing math any more than before, but they might find themselves able to do it more successfully.

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Does Language Trigger Visual Memories? – Part 1

One of the fundamental questions in cognitive science is how information is stored in the brain and in the mind. There are innumerable different models, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, but the one that I will be addressing here is known as embodiment.
From a neurolinguistic perspective, embodiment is the idea that the semantic content belonging to words is linked to sensorimotor representations in the brain. So if you talk about doing something, your brain behaves (to some extent) as if you are actually doing it.
In a view known as “weak embodiment”, linguistic and conceptual representations overlap in certain sensorimotor areas. In the “strong embodiment” view, linguistic and conceptual representations are much more strongly linked, with some researchers suggesting that action words actually trigger the neuronal assemblies that are associated with those actions.
A recent study sought to discover if either of these two views could be supported by neuroimaging. The researchers played sentences describing dynamic (“the mechanic is walking toward the airplane”) or static (“the mechanic is looking at the airplane”) situations and measured the brain response. The researchers looked in particular both in the visual cortex area V5 — which is known to respond to visual motion perception — as well as other temporal areas of the brain.
They suggested that, if the strong embodiment view holds, dynamic descriptions should trigger activity in areas that are very strongly linked with visual motion perception, like V5. If the weak embodiment holds, they said, it was more likely that these descriptions would not trigger V5, but would activate other areas related to motion perception (presumably ones that are less strongly linked to visual cues).
After using localizer stimuli to determine the location of each participant’s V5 area, the authors analyzed the effect of static and dynamic language stimuli on this area. They found activation in the left posterior middle and superior temporal gyri, near V5, but crucially, no overlap between language-activated areas and V5 proper, supporting the weak embodiment theory of language.
So what does this all mean? The authors point out that the sensorimotor representations that are triggered by language are not as specific as the strong embodiment view suggests. In this case, language triggered activation in areas that are more generally linked, amodally, to motion. These parts of the cortex seem to be activated by amodal information related to motion, such as animacy or intention. This has significant implications for theories of embodiment, as strong claims of embodiment must now come up with a way to explain the finding that “once-removed”, schematic areas are activated by language, instead of modality specific representations  (as far as I am aware, there hasn’t been a response to this article from proponents of the strong embodiment view, but I’m sure it’s coming).

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that this may have some relevance for theories on the relationship between language and non-linguistic cognition. Visual sensorimotor representations, being non-linguistic, seem to be triggered, though somewhat indirectly, by language. Exactly how this works could also be important in understanding the other ways in which language and memory interact.

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Does Language Trigger Visual Memories? – Part 2

I recently wrote an article about the connection between language and visual memories in which the authors of the study concluded that the strong version of embodied cognition was not supported. Another recent article about embodiment came to a very different conclusion, which I thought I’d discuss further.
This study used a different kind of methodology in which subjects were asked to remember a series of words while performing an interference task. The words belonged to one of two groups: arm-related words, like grasp, braid, nip, wash, hack, and delve; or leg-related words, such as stride, plod, skate, inch, and dance.
There were four different interference conditions: a control condition, where there was no interference activity; an articulation condition, in which subjects had to repeat a nonsense syllable; an arm interference condition, in which subjects tapped a single paradiddle (e.g. LRLLRLRRLRLLRLRR) with their hands; and a foot interference condition in which they tapped the paradiddle with their feet. After the subjects were presented with four words, there was a six-second interval in which they were asked to perform the interference task, subsequent to which they were asked to repeat the four words they were shown.
Based on a weak embodiment view, like the one I detailed in my last post on this topic, verbal memory for both categories of words should have either been affected equally by both tasks or not affected at all, depending on exactly which theory you ascribe to. However, a strong embodiment view predicts that memory for arm-related words would be more affected by arm motions, and leg words by leg motion.
Although there wasn’t a statistically significant disruption, there was a trend toward significance supporting the strong embodiment view. There was a significant interaction of word type with moving body part, providing further support to the idea that semantic memory and sensorimotor representations are closely linked in the brain and the mind.
This study does provide some compelling evidence for strong embodiment, but it also raises a lot of questions. Is it possible that there’s some other process at work here? The authors mention several times that this particular methodology has been used to draw causal conclusions in the past, and so they feel confident in doing the same, but it’s possible to draw other conclusions from this data. Another question that deserves answering is whether the choice of specific arm- and leg-related words modulates the effect. Many of the leg words, for example, actually refer to whole-body motions that are driven by leg motions.

And even if we take this study to conclusively prove that sensorimotor representations are required to for working memory, what about long-term memory? And how might they modulate attention or other cognitive actions? This is an area that is going to receive a lot of attention in the near future, and I have high hopes for some very interesting results.

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Is Thinking Bad For Your Brain?

Basic scientific research, old wives’ tales, and common sense all suggest that the best way to promote brain function is to keep your mind active. Intriguingly however, a recent report from Elsa Suberbielle and colleagues published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, seems to suggest just the opposite.
The DNA double helix that encodes the human genome is comprised of approximately 3 billion base pairs that dictate all of our characteristics, ranging from our eye color to our predisposition to heart disease. Disruption of proper base pairing including mutations, insertions, and deletions may lead to a variety of changes in our makeup. Although some of these base pair disruptions are more deleterious that others, double stranded breaks (DSB) in the DNA double helix remains of the most lethal.
Recent evidence indicates that normal exploration of a new environment causes significant increases in DNA DSBs in mice. In these studies, mice were moved from their home cage to a new larger cage comprised of different litter, odors, stations, and toys. They were allowed to explore the new cage for two hours with other mice that they were familiar with from their home cage. Interestingly, many of the documented breaks in DNA were found in the brain region referred to as the dentate gyrus, which is a critical region for learning and memory.
While, at first glance these data seem to suggest that “normal” thinking is bad for us, commentary from Herrup and colleagues addresses this issue. They report that while the data is scientifically sound, they may need to be viewed from a different perspective. For example, they suggest that the assays used to measure DNA DSBs may in fact be leading to the reported damage and that this idea should be further examined. In addition, is possible that the damage in DNA is functioning as a regulatory mechanism. Perhaps, by allowing some level of DNA damage, a higher degree of neuronal regulation can be achieved. Suberbielle hypothesizes that the formation of the DSBs is a natural process that permits for the remodeling of DNA and changes in gene expression that are necessary for learning, memory, and the effective processing of information.

It may be enticing to initially conclude from this report that thinking is bad for your brain. However, these data should be intended as a springboard for further studies in this area and the genetic regulatory mechanisms that are in place during “normal” brain function.

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What You Hear Affects What You See

There are a lot of different models of attention, and the differences between them can be complex and subtle. Most of them, however, treat attention as a limited and expendable resource — you can only pay attention to so many things for so long a time. Is attention really in short supply?
Attention is usually not modality specific: For example, if you’re making a lot of effort paying attention to something that you’re seeing, you’re not likely to be able allocate attention to an acoustic cue as well. In short, there isn’t a store of visual attention, a separate store of aural attention, another one for tactile attention, and so on. There’s just one central store of attention.
Recent evidence has also led many researchers believe that rhythms entrain the attentional system so that it increases the amount of attention allocated at certain temporal locations. For example, if you see a blinking light, neural oscillations will synchronize with the rhythm of the blinking, so that you’re paying more attention at the points when the light is likely to be on.
A study published earlier this year used a fascinating methodology to determine whether or not this entrainment is cross-modal. Participants heard a tone played at regular or irregular intervals for a specified amount of time. At the end, a dot would appear in one of the four corners of a screen (the appearance of the dot was either synchronized with the final tone in the series, played earlier than the tone, or played later than the tone) and the participants would look at it. The researchers measured how long it took the participants to fixate on the dot.
Interestingly, participants were significantly faster to fixate on the dot when it was synchronized with the final tone than when it was not, suggesting that the visual attentional system was entrained by the aural tone series. When the experimenters omitted the final tone, the results remained the same, proving that it wasn’t the final tone itself that speeded up fixation, but the rhythm that preceded it.
Another important note is that participants weren’t directed to attend to the auditory tones. In fact, they weren’t told anything about them at all, suggesting that the entrainment of the attentional system is automatic and unconscious.
Although they may seem intuitively obvious, these findings lend additional insight into how attention works, and give major support to the idea that attention is a limited resource that is shared between different perceptual modalities, and provides proof that entrainment developed through one modality is accessed by other modalities.

Research on neural oscillation has been quite fruitful recently, and this is another example of how this is at the core of processes that we take for granted, like rhythmic attentional entrainment and many other temporal processes in the brain. Exactly how this low-level process is integrated into higher-level systems, like time-keeping and attention, is likely to see a lot more research in the near future.

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