People frequently encounter numeric information in medical and health contexts. In this paper, we investigated the math factors that are associated with decision-making accuracy in health and non-health contexts. This is an important endeavor given that there is relatively little cross-talk between math cognition researchers and those studying…

At the onset of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) global pandemic, our interdisciplinary team hypothesized that a mathematical misconception--whole number bias (WNB)--contributed to beliefs that COVID-19 was less fatal than the flu. We created a brief online educational intervention for adults, leveraging evidence-based cognitive science…

Math anxiety--negative feelings toward math--is hypothesized to be associated with the avoidance of math-related activities such as taking math courses and pursuing STEM careers. However, there is little experimental evidence for the math anxiety-avoidance link. Such evidence is important for formulating how to break this relationship. We…

Adults use a variety of strategies to reason about fraction magnitudes, and this variability is adaptive. In two studies, we examined the relationships between mathematics anxiety, working memory, strategy variability and performance on two fraction tasks: fraction magnitude "comparison" and "estimation." Adults with higher…

People's attitudes toward mathematics are multifaceted. Across four studies, we found that children and adults have different attitudes about mathematics when asked specifically about whole numbers, as opposed to fractions. The vast majority of children and adults reported negative attitudes toward fractions despite having positive attitudes…

Individuals with better spatial thinking have increased interest and greater achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines (Wai, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2009). This relationship means that STEM education may benefit from leveraging spatial thinking, but measures of spatial thinking as they relate to specific…