Put you in the problem: Effects of self-pronouns on mathematical problem solving

Cunningham et al. Put you in the problem: Effects of self-pronouns on mathematical problem solving. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Two experiments explored the effect of including the self pronoun ("You") in children's maths word problems. Both experiments included addition and subtraction word problems and manipulated whether a referent was Self (pronoun "You") or Other (typically a name such as "Sam"). In addition, Experiment 1 (described Pilot Study in the manuscript) manipulated the position of the referent. For half the trials, the referent was presented as the anchoring first word, and in the other half as a subsequent (non-anchoring) word. Experiment 2 (described as Main Study in the manuscript) manipulated the difficulty of the problems. Half the trials had consistent wording where the relational words in the problem mapped to the operation to be performed; the other half had inconsistent wording where the operation was not clear from the relational words included. For both experiments, additional measures for attention and working memory are included.