The current study reports a pre-registered investigation into the interrelations between mathematics anxiety, metacognition and mathematical decision-making. Although this question has already received some attention in previous work, reliance on self-report measures of metacognition has hindered its interpretation. Here, a novel experimental mathematical decision-making task was used in which participants solved mathematical assignments of varying difficulty, and expressed their level of confidence in the accuracy of their decision both prospectively and retrospectively. Mathematics anxiety was measured using a standardized questionnaire. Both prospective and retrospective confidence judgments predicted unique variation in accuracy; however, the explanatory effect of prospective confidence disappeared after taking task difficulty into account. This suggests that prospective, but not retrospective, confidence is largely based on easily available cues indicative of performance. Results of a multiple regression analysis indicated that individual differences in mathematics anxiety were negatively related to the overall level of confidence (both prospectively and retrospectively), and positively related to metacognitive efficiency (only prospectively). Having insight in these interrelationships is important in the context of remediating mathematics anxiety, which might in turn be useful with regard to the worldwide need for more workers with degrees in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM).

目前的研究报告了对数学焦虑、元认知和数学决策之间相互关系的预先登记调查。虽然这个问题在之前的工作中已经受到了一些关注，但依赖于元认知的自我报告测量阻碍了它的解释。在这里，使用了一项新的实验性数学决策任务，参与者解决了不同难度的数学任务，并在前瞻性和回顾性方面表达了他们对决策准确性的信心水平。使用标准化问卷测量数学焦虑。前瞻性和回顾性置信度判断都预测了准确性的独特变化；然而，考虑到任务难度后，前瞻性信心的解释作用消失了。这表明，前瞻性而非回顾性的信心主要基于容易获得的表现表现线索。多元回归分析结果表明，数学焦虑的个体差异与总体水平呈负相关。信心（前瞻性和回顾性），并且与元认知效率正相关（仅前瞻性）。在纠正数学焦虑的背景下，洞察这些相互关系非常重要，这反过来可能有助于全球需要更多拥有科学、技术、工程或数学 (STEM) 学位的工作者。