Math Anxiety and Metacognition: How Numerical Content Shapes Confidence

Math anxiety is robustly linked to lower success rates in mathematical tasks, yet its relation to metacognitive aspects, such as confidence and overconfidence, remains less well understood. Moreover, prior research often used tasks in which numerical content and mathematical reasoning were intertwined, making it difficult to determine whether math anxiety is triggered by computation itself or by numerical framing more broadly. To address these gaps, two experiments examined associations between math anxiety, task success rates, confidence, and overconfidence. In both experiments, participants completed a novel Single-Answer Sudoku Task (SAST) and the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), together with anxiety-related self-report questionnaires. In Experiment 1 (N = 209), the SAST contained numbers, similar to the traditional Sudoku. Math anxiety predicted lower success rates and confidence, and greater overconfidence, in both the numerical SAST and the CRT, beyond relevant individual-difference variables. Experiment 2 (N = 200) used a structurally identical SAST, in which letters replaced numbers. While the CRT results replicated Experiment 1, math anxiety no longer predicted confidence or overconfidence in the letter SAST. The findings suggest that math anxiety relates to impaired metacognitive monitoring when numerical content is present, even without computational demands, but not in equivalent non-numerical reasoning tasks.