Individuals lower in working memory capacity are particularly vulnerable to anxiety's disruptive effect on performance

Abstract

Anxiety has a disruptive effect on performance in a number of domains. The purpose of this study was to determine whether individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity are related to an individual's susceptibility to anxiety's detrimental effect on performance. Fifty undergraduate students (28 females) were administered the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) (Spielberger, Gorsuch, Lushene, Vagg, & Jacobs, 1983) to measure trait anxiety and the automated operation span task to measure WM capacity (Unsworth, Heitz, Schrock, & Engle, 2005). Then, they performed a highly demanding dual-task that consisted of a primary short-term memory task and a secondary tone-discrimination task that served as a measure of spare capacity. Anxiety and WM capacity interacted to affect performance on the auditory task so that those low in WM capacity were particularly vulnerable to anxiety's disruptive effect, whereas those high in WM capacity were buffered against anxiety's effect. These findings suggest that WM capacity may be an important factor in determining which individuals underperform on anxiety-provoking tests such as scholastic achievement tests.     

Benefits from retrieval practice are greater for students with lower working memory capacity

We examined the effects of retrieval practice for students who varied in working memory capacity as a function of the lag between study of material and its initial test, whether or not feedback was given after the test, and the retention interval of the final test. We sought to determine whether a blend of these conditions exists that maximises benefits from retrieval practice for lower and higher working memory capacity students. College students learned general knowledge facts and then restudied the facts or were tested on them (with or without feedback) at lags of 0–9 intervening items. Final cued recall performance was better for tested items than for restudied items after both 10 minutes and 2 days, particularly for longer study–test lags. Furthermore, on the 2-day delayed test the benefits from retrieval practice with feedback were significantly greater for students with lower working memory capacity than for students with higher working memory capacity (r?=??.42). Retrieval practice may be an especially effective learning strategy for lower ability students.     

Roles of working memory capacity and long-term working memory skill in complex task performance

In the present research, we examined the relative roles of domain-general and domain-specific individual difference characteristics in complex cognitive task performance. Specifically, we examined the impact both of working memory (WM) capacity and of acquired skills used to encode presented information in an accessible form in long-term working memory (LTWM) on performance in a complex aviation task environment. Measures of WM capacity and LTWM skill served as performance predictors. A criterion measure of task performance was related to the predictor measures. The results indicated that an increase in LTWM skill decreases the role of WM capacity as the determinant of complex task performance, although both measures are important performance predictors. We discuss how the two distinct WM constructs coexist and interact to support complex task performance.     

The effect of working memory capacity on conflict monitoring

The conflict adaptation effect, a reduced interference effect upon the detection of a conflict signal (e.g., following an incongruent trial), has been interpreted as evidence for active regulation of top-down cognitive control. We hypothesized that the extent of conflict adaptation should be related to individuals' working memory capacity (WMC), which has been repeatedly demonstrated to reflect the level of cognitive control. Using the Simon task, in Experiment 1, we quantified the conflict adaptation ratio (CAR) transiently as the ratio of the conflict effect following an incongruent trial to the conflict effect following a congruent trial, controlling for the reaction time that often correlates with WMC. We observed that the CAR varied from highly negative with low WMC scores to near-zero with high WMC scores. This result suggests that high WMC individuals, when detecting conflict, adjust the level of cognitive control optimally so that their performance is less susceptible to the presence of a distractor. In Experiment 2, we quantified the CAR in a sustained manner as the ratio of the conflict effect from predominantly incongruent blocks to the conflict effect from predominantly congruent blocks. Again, the CAR varied from negative to zero as WMC increased. These results suggest that WMC may reflect, in addition to the ability to maintain a level of control, the ability to adjust the level of control appropriately to the contextual demands.     

Individuals with pronounced schizotypal traits are particularly successful in tickling themselves

We assessed self-tickling sensations in a group of participants high in schizotypal traits (n = 27) and group of participants low in schizotypal traits (n = 27). The groups were formed by screening a pool of 397 students for extreme scores in the French version of the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire. As observed in a previous study involving psychiatric people with auditory hallucinations and/or passivity experiences our results showed that self-applied tactile stimulations are felt to be more ticklish by healthy individuals high in schizotypal traits. In contrast, there were no significant intergroup differences in the mean tickle rating in the externally-produced tickling condition. Furthermore, more successful self-tickling was associated with more frequent self-reports of unusual perceptual experiences (such as supernatural experiences) and passivity experiences in particular (such as a feeling of being under the control of an outside force or power).     

Worry in imagery and verbal form: effect on residual working memory capacity

Worry-prone individuals have less residual working memory capacity during worry compared to low-worriers (Hayes, Hirsch, & Mathews, 2008). People typically worry in verbal form, and the present study investigated whether verbal worry depletes working memory capacity more than worry in imagery-based form. High and low-worriers performed a working memory task, random interval generation, whilst thinking about a worry in verbal or imagery form. High (but not low) worriers had less available working memory capacity when worrying in verbal compared to imagery-based form. The findings could not be accounted for by general attentional control, amount of negatively-valenced thought, or appraisals participants made about worry topics. The findings indicate that the verbal nature of worry is implicated in the depletion of working memory resources during worry among high-worriers, and point to the potential value of imagery-based techniques in cognitive-behavioural treatments for problematic worry.     

Utilization deficiency and working memory capacity in adult memory performance: not just for children anymore

In acquiring mnemonic strategies, children may demonstrate a utilization deficiency phase in which they successfully execute a strategy but it does not facilitate memory performance. The present experiment suggests that utilization deficiencies are not a developmental phenomenon per se, but rather a byproduct of diminished working memory capacity for any reason (i.e., maturation, knowledge base, context, individual differences, etc.). Adults performing a series of study-test memory trials using nonsense words exhibited characteristics of utilization deficiencies, with increased strategy use not contributing to increased memory performance. Furthermore, adults’ working memory capacity modified the effect. Implications of these findings for developmental models of strategy acquisition are discussed.     

Effects of emotional content on working memory capacity

Emotional events tend to be remembered better than neutral events, but emotional states and stimuli may also interfere with cognitive processes that underlie memory performance. The current study investigated the effects of emotional content on working memory capacity (WMC), which involves both short term storage and executive attention control. We tested competing hypotheses in a preregistered experiment (N?=?297). The emotional enhancement hypothesis predicts that emotional stimuli attract attention and additional processing resources relative to neutral stimuli, thereby making it easier to encode and store emotional information in WMC. The emotional impairment hypothesis, by contrast, predicts that emotional stimuli interfere with attention control and the active maintenance of information in working memory. Participants completed a common measure of WMC (the operation span task; Turner, M. L., &; Engle, R. W. [1989]. Is working memory capacity task dependent? Journal of Memory and Language, 28, 127–154) that included either emotional or neutral words. Results revealed that WMC was reduced for emotional words relative to neutral words, consistent with the emotional impairment hypothesis.     

Spatial attention and feature-based attention are differentially sensitive to individual working memory capacity and perceptual load

ABSTRACT

A central and long-standing topic of interest to both psychologists and neuroscientists has been the capacity limited nature of perception, cognition and action. Most often, attention is the term invoked to label the mechanism by which a limited cognitive system can prioritize and select a subset of task-relevant sensory inputs and actions amongst a seemingly unbounded set of possible representations and behaviour. This selective mechanism is often modelled as a unitary and domain-general capacity-limited resource that is dynamically shifted to meet the processing demands invoked by the context. The present work offers a test of the unitary attention hypothesis using a variant of a classic validity manipulation [(Posner, M. I. (1980). Orienting of attention. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 32, 3–25)] and the inferential logic of Sternberg (2001. Separate modifiability, mental modules, and the use of pure and composite measures to reveal them. Acta Psychologica, 106, 147–246). The results stand as evidence for at least two modular visual attention systems split according to a spatial and feature-based reference.     

Individual differences in working memory capacity predict sleep-dependent memory consolidation

Decades of research have established that "online" cognitive processes, which operate during conscious encoding and retrieval of information, contribute substantially to individual differences in memory. Furthermore, it is widely accepted that "offline" processes during sleep also contribute to memory performance. However, the question of whether individual differences in these two types of processes are related to one another remains unanswered. We investigated whether working memory capacity (WMC), a factor believed to contribute substantially to individual differences in online processing, was related to sleep-dependent declarative memory consolidation. Consistent with previous studies, memory for word pairs reliably improved after a period of sleep, whereas performance did not improve after an equal interval of wakefulness. More important, there was a significant, positive correlation between WMC and increase in memory performance after sleep but not after a period of wakefulness. The correlation between WMC and performance during initial test was not significant, suggesting that the relationship is specific to change in memory due to sleep. This suggests a fundamental underlying ability that may distinguish individuals with high memory capacity.     

An examination of the seductive details effect in terms of working memory capacity

Previous work on learning from text has demonstrated that although illustrated text can enhance comprehension, illustrations can also sometimes lead to poor learning outcomes when they are not relevant to understanding the text This phenomenon is known as the seductive details effect. The first experiment was designed to test whether the ability to control one's attention, as measured by working memory span tasks, would influence the processing of a scientific text that contained seductive (irrelevant) images, conceptually relevant images, or no illustrations. Understanding was evaluated using both an essay response and an inference verification task. Results indicated that low working memory capacity readers are especially vulnerable to the seductive details effect. In the second experiment, this issue was explored further, using eye-tracking methodology to evaluate the reading patterns of individuals who differed in working memory capacity as they read the same seductively illustrated scientific text Results indicated that low working memory individuals attend to seductive illustrations more often than not and, also, for a longer duration than do those individuals high in working memory capacity.     

How to measure working memory capacity in the change detection paradigm

Although the measurement of working memory capacity is crucial to understanding working memory and its interaction with other cognitive faculties, there are inconsistencies in the literature on how to measure capacity. We address the measurement in the change detection paradigm, popularized by Luck and Vogel (Nature, 390, 279-281, 1997). Two measures for this task-from Pashler (Perception & Psychophysics, 44, 369-378, 1988) and Cowan (The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24, 87-114, 2001), respectively-have been used interchangeably, even though they may yield qualitatively different conclusions. We show that the choice between these two measures is not arbitrary. Although they are motivated by the same underlying discrete-slots working memory model, each is applicable only to a specific task; the two are never interchangeable. In the course of deriving these measures, we discuss subtle but consequential flaws in the underlying discrete-slots model. These flaws motivate revision in the modal model and capacity measures.     

Individual differences in working memory capacity and enumeration

Two experiments are reported in which subjects performed working memory and enumeration tasks. In the first experiment, subjects scoring low on the working memory task also performed poorly on the attention-demanding "counting" portion of the enumeration task. Yet no span differences were found for the non-attention-demanding "subitizing" portion. In Experiment 2, conjunctive and disjunctive distractors were added to the enumeration task. Although both high and low working memory span subjects were adversely affected by the addition of conjunctive distractors, the effect was much greater for the low-span subjects. Implications from these findings are that differences in working memory capacity correspond to differences in capability for controlled attention.     

Depressive thoughts limit working memory capacity in dysphoria

Dysphoria is associated with persistence of attention on mood-congruent information. Longer time attending to mood-congruent information for dysphoric individuals (DIs) detracts from goal-relevant information processing and should reduce working memory (WM) capacity. Study 1 showed that DIs and non-DIs have similar WM capacities. Study 2 embedded depressive information into a WM task. Compared to non-DIs, DIs showed significantly reduced WM capacity for goal-relevant information in this task. Study 3 replicated results from Studies 1 and 2, and further showed that DIs had a significantly greater association between processing speed and recall on the depressively modified WM task compared to non-DIs. The presence of inter-task depressive information leads to DI-related decreased WM capacity. Results suggest dysphoria-related WM capacity deficits when depressive thoughts are present. WM capacity deficits in the presence of depressive thoughts are a plausible mechanism to explain day-to-day memory and concentration difficulties associated with depressed mood.     

Variation in working memory capacity and temporal-contextual retrieval from episodic memory

Unsworth and Engle (2007) recently proposed a model of working memory capacity characterized by, among other things, the ability to conduct a strategic, cue-dependent search of long-term memory. Although this ability has been found to mediate individual variation in a number of higher order cognitive tasks, the component processes involved remain unclear. The current study was designed to investigate individual variation in successfully retrieving information from episodic memory by examining various aspects of the retrieval process. Both high- and low-working memory capacity participants were found to initiate recall in a similar fashion; however, low-working memory capacity participants did not show the classic asymmetry in their conditional-response probabilities that is typically observed. Overall, the retrieval deficits observed in low-working memory capacity individuals appear to be rooted in their inability to use the products of retrieval to further aid their search.     

Effects of working memory capacity on mental set due to domain knowledge

The present set of studies examines how working memory capacity (WMC) relates to performance on a Remote Associates Task (RAT), originally designed by Mednick as a quantifiable creative problem solving assessment. The source of fixation was manipulated across two sets of RAT items. One set was neutral with no specific fixation embedded in them, while the second set was baseball-misleading, designed so that prior knowledge of baseball would lead to an incorrect solution attempt. WMC scores were positively related to performance on RAT items in all conditions, except one. High baseball knowledge participants' WMC scores did not relate to performance on the baseball-misleading RAT. While in general WMC may lead to better RAT performance, these results suggest that when there is a candidate solution strongly activated by prior knowledge, WMC may actually lead to too much focus on the incorrect solution and exacerbate mental sets.     

Examining the effects of frustration on working memory capacity

The present study attempts to expand our understanding of frustration, clinical symptoms, and working memory by examining the unique contribution of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms and frustration to working memory capacity (WMC). A factor-analytic framework was utilized to isolate and examine WMC based on results from three working memory tasks that were administered in counterbalanced order to control for individual differences in baseline WMC. All participants provided subjective ratings of frustration both prior to and after administration of a frustration induction. Results suggest that although we were able to systematically induce subjective frustration for participants in the experimental group relative to the control group, WMC was not associated with induced frustration in the present study. Results also indicated that inattention symptoms predicted baseline frustration levels. This work highlights the need to examine the extent to which storage/rehearsal WMC and additional process-oriented working memory-related performance variables are related to frustration. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.     

视觉工作记忆的同类别存储优势

概念规律如记忆项间的类别关系如何影响视觉工作记忆容量是一个有争议的问题。针对该问题, 学界存在两种预测截然不同的假说：(1)混合类别优势假说, (2)同类别优势假说。综述文献发现, 该类研究均采用带有细节特征的真实客体作为实验材料, 因此前人研究中发现的混合类别优势效应或同类别优势效应中必然混有低水平知觉特征的影响。故本研究采用去除细节信息的动物剪影作为记忆材料来排除上述因素的影响, 旨在厘清上述两种假设, 并采用对侧延迟活动作为神经指标, 来进一步探讨概念规律影响工作记忆容量的内在机制。两个行为实验发现, 不论记忆项同时呈现还是序列呈现, 均存在同类别记忆优势效应。脑电实验结果发现相比记忆不同类别客体, 记忆同等数量的同类别客体诱发的对侧延迟活动的幅值更小。上述结果一致表明, 视觉工作记忆可借助概念的方式将同类别客体加以组织, 从而有效扩大视觉工作记忆容量, 支持了同类别优势假说。     

The effects of active worrying on working memory capacity

According to the attentional control theory, worry, a crucial component of anxiety, impairs task performance through its direct effect on working memory capacity (WMC) by using up the limited resources available for performance thus reducing attentional control. We tested this hypothesis in the current study by examining the causal influence of active worrying on WMC in a sample of undergraduate university students (n?=?64) assigned either to a worry condition or to a non-worry control condition. Participants performed a change detection task before and after the worry/control manipulation. Mediation analyses showed that the level of self-reported worry mediated the effects of condition on change in WMC as demonstrated by the significant indirect effect of worry and the resulting non-significant direct effect of condition on change in WMC. Similar results were obtained when using state anxiety measures as mediating factors. Results of the current study are amongst the first to demonstrate that worry impairs WMC and as such have important implications for understanding the impact of worry.     

Intrusion errors in visuospatial working memory performance

This study tested the hypothesis that failure in active visuospatial working memory tasks involves a difficulty in avoiding intrusions due to information that is already activated. Two experiments are described, in which participants were required to process several series of locations on a 4 x 4 matrix and then to produce only the final location of each series. Results revealed a higher number of errors due to already activated locations (intrusions) compared with errors due to new locations (inventions). Moreover, when participants were required to pay extra attention to some irrelevant (non-final) locations by tapping on the table, intrusion errors increased. Results are discussed in terms of current models of working memory functioning.