The consequence of refreshing for access to nonselected items in young and older adults

We examined the effect of competition on briefly thinking of just-seen items. In Experiment 1, participants saw a set of either three related or three unrelated words and then read one of the words again (repeat) or thought briefly of one of the words (refresh). Participants read the set a second time, after which they either refreshed a second word from the set or read a new word. In comparison with reading a new word, response times were slower for refreshing the second item when participants had just refreshed than when they had just repeated the first item. This increase was larger for related words than for unrelated words and for older adults than for younger adults. In Experiment 2, a negative impact of refreshing was observed when participants repeated a different word from the set. The pattern of findings suggests that the negative impact of refreshing comes from increased competition from the refreshed item, rather than from inhibition of the nonrefreshed items.     

Short-term retention of a single word relies on retrieval from long-term memory when both rehearsal and refreshing are disrupted

Many working memory (WM) models propose that the focus of attention (or primary memory) has a capacity limit of one to four items, and therefore, that performance on WM tasks involves retrieving some items from long-term (or secondary) memory (LTM). In the present study, we present evidence suggesting that recall of even one item on a WM task can involve retrieving it from LTM. The WM task required participants to make a deep (living/nonliving) or shallow (“e”/no “e”) level-of-processing (LOP) judgment on one word and to recall the word after a 10-s delay on each trial. During the delay, participants either rehearsed the word or performed an easy or a hard math task. When the to-be-remembered item could be rehearsed, recall was fast and accurate. When it was followed by a math task, recall was slower, error-prone, and benefited from a deeper LOP at encoding, especially for the hard math condition. The authors suggest that a covert-retrieval mechanism may have refreshed the item during easy math, and that the hard math condition shows that even a single item cannot be reliably held in WM during a sufficiently distracting task—therefore, recalling the item involved retrieving it from LTM. Additionally, performance on a final free recall (LTM) test was better for items recalled following math than following rehearsal, suggesting that initial recall following math involved elaborative retrieval from LTM, whereas rehearsal did not. The authors suggest that the extent to which performance on WM tasks involves retrieval from LTM depends on the amounts of disruption to both rehearsal and covert-retrieval/refreshing maintenance mechanisms.     

Comparing effects of perceptual and reflective repetition on subjective experience during later recognition memory

Using the Remember/Know procedure, we compared the impact of a reflective repetition by refreshing (i.e., briefly thinking of a just-seen item) and a perceptual repetition (i.e., seeing an item again) on subjective experience during recognition memory. Participants read aloud words as they appeared on a screen. Critical words were presented once (read condition), immediately repeated (repeat condition), or followed by a dot signalling the participants to think of and say the just-previous word (refresh condition). In Experiments 1 and 2, Remember responses benefited from refreshing a word (in comparison with reading it). In Experiment 2, this benefit disappeared when participants had to refresh one of three active items. Perceptual repetition increased Remember responses in Experiment 1, but not in Experiment 2 regardless of whether participants had just previously seen 1- or 3-items. These findings indicate that under some circumstances, reflective and perceptual repetition may have different consequences for later subjective experience during remembering, suggesting differences in their underlying functional mechanisms.     

When children forget to remember: Effects of reduced working memory availability on prospective memory performance

The preparatory attentional and memory processes theory (PAM) of prospective memory (PM) proposes that prospective remembering is influenced by the variation in the availability of WM resources. Consequently, PM should be impaired when WM resources are reduced either by direct WM manipulation or by individual differences associated with restricted WM performance. Our study tested this prediction in school-age children by examining the independent and interactive effects of three factors known to deplete availability of WM resources: increased processing demands of a concurrent arithmetic task, additional WM span requirements, and high trait anxiety. A sample of 10-year-old children (N = 128) performed a PM task, embedded in an ongoing arithmetic task, which progressively imposed greater WM processing demands. Half of these participants also concurrently carried out an embedded WM span task. The results supported the PAM hypothesis, showing that children’s PM was compromised by the restriction of WM resources, whether this resulted from increasing the processing demands on the ongoing task, from imposing additional WM span requirements, or from high trait anxiety. However, these WM-depleting factors exerted additive effects rather than an interactive impact, suggesting that they might each deplete different aspects of WM resource availability necessary for prospective remembering. Overall findings imply that children’s PM success is not only associated to their WM capacity but it mostly depends upon how many of those WM resources are available to be devoted to the PM requirement.     

刷微博，让焦虑的人更焦虑——特质焦虑对青少年注意情绪刺激的影响

采用自由观看眼动追踪范式,考察特质焦虑青少年在观看情绪面孔图片过程中的眼动轨迹。结果发现,高特质焦虑组对愤怒和恐惧面孔的首次注视到达时间（TFF）较快,首次注视持续时间（TFD）较短;低特质焦虑组对愤怒和恐惧面孔的TFF虽然稍早于平静面孔,但差异不显著。在刺激呈现1000ms之后,高特质焦虑组对愤怒和恐惧面孔的注视次数（FC）较多,平均注视持续时间（AFD）较短。低特质焦虑组对愤怒和恐惧面孔的FC较少,AFD较长;这就表明,高特质焦虑青少年在认知加工早期对威胁性刺激注意定向加速,没有注意解除困难,呈现“浅尝辄止”现象。而在认知加工晚期,他们则对威胁性刺激存在“反刍”现象。     

非自主闯入焦虑发生的机制：阈下启动效应的实验研究

本研究采用阈下情感启动范式, 研究威胁信息启动效应及其特质焦虑的调节作用,旨在揭示焦虑非自主闯入性特点形成的机制。实验在随机的三种条件下（阈上/阈下/基线）给38名被试呈现两种目标词（威胁词和中性词）,其中基线条件不呈现目标词;之后要求被试在回避目标词的条件下完成组词任务,结果：（1）无论是中性词还是威胁词,被试阈下条件下目标词的击中率显著高于基线条件;（2）特质焦虑对阈下启动效应起着调节作用：高焦虑组被试威胁词的启动效应显著高于中性词,低焦虑组被试中性词的启动效应显著高于威胁词。结论：阈下启动效应显著,高特质焦虑组个体对威胁信息的无意识加工会增强对威胁信息的意识加工,产生闯入性想法,导致焦虑非自主闯入性的特点。     

Working memory, perceptual priming, and the perception of hierarchical forms: Opposite effects of priming and working memory without memory refreshing

Previous research has shown that stimuli held in working memory (WM) can influence spatial attention. Using Navon stimuli, we explored whether and how items in WM affect the perception of visual targets at local and global levels in compound letters. Participants looked for a target letter presented at a local or global level while holding a regular block letter as a memory item. An effect of holding the target’s identity in WM was found. When memory items and targets were the same, performance was better than in a neutral condition when the memory item did not appear in the hierarchical letter (a benefit from valid cuing). When the memory item matched the distractor in the hierarchical stimulus, performance was worse than in the neutral baseline (a cost on invalid trials). These effects were greatest when the WM cue matched the global level of the hierarchical stimulus, suggesting that WM biases attention to the global level of form. Interestingly, in a no-memory priming condition, target perception was faster in the invalid condition than in the neutral baseline, reversing the effect in the WM condition. A further control experiment ruled out the effects of WM being due to participants’ refreshing their memory from the hierarchical stimulus display. The data show that information in WM biases the selection of hierarchical forms, whereas priming does not. Priming alters the perceptual processing of repeated stimuli without biasing attention.     

Attention to Positive and Negative Social-Evaluative Words: Investigating the Effects of Social Anxiety,Trait Anxiety and Social Threat

The study investigated how attention to negative (threatening) and positive social-evaluative words is affected by social anxiety, trait anxiety and the expectation of social threat. High and low socially anxious individuals carried out a modified dot-probe task either while expecting to give a speech or under non-threatening conditions. High socially anxious individuals showed no significant attentional bias towards or away from social-evaluative words. This result significantly contrasted with an identical design that showed avoidance of emotional faces in high socially anxious participants drawn from the same population (Mansell et al ., 1999). Participants who expected to give a speech showed less attentional avoidance of negative and positive social-evaluative words. High trait anxiety was associated with selective attention to negative relative to positive social-evaluative words, consistent with earlier findings of attention to threat cues in high trait-anxious individuals. Implications for designing attention tasks and attentional bias across different dimensions of anxiety are discussed.     

Trait worry is associated with difficulties in working memory updating

The current study investigated the effects of trait worry, a subcomponent of trait anxiety, on the process of updating information in working memory (WM). A leading theory on anxiety and executive functions, attentional control theory (ACT), states that anxiety is not related to WM updating in emotionally neutral situations. Previous research, however, has focused almost exclusively on WM span tasks that primarily emphasised storage, rather than the updating of WM representations. Moreover, few studies have directly examined the effects of trait worry. In this study, 116 subjects performed a WM updating task that required the memorisation of short lists of words and the within-trial removal of some of these items from WM. Results indicated that levels of trait worry were not related to word-span performance, but were related to performance on trials that required subjects to effectively update WM. Moreover, these effects were observed only for trait worry, not for levels of anxious arousal or comorbid levels of dysphoria. These results support the hypothesis that trait worry is related to WM updating performance and thereby extend ACT in new directions.     

Affective significance enhances covert attention: Roles of anxiety and word familiarity

To investigate the processing of emotional words by covert attention, threat-related, positive, and neutral word primes were presented parafoveally (2.2° away from fixation) for 150 ms, under gaze-contingent foveal masking, to prevent eye fixations. The primes were followed by a probe word in a lexical-decision task. In Experiment 1, results showed a parafoveal threat–anxiety superiority: Parafoveal prime threat words facilitated responses to probe threat words for high-anxiety individuals, in comparison with neutral and positive words, and relative to low-anxiety individuals. This reveals an advantage in threat processing by covert attention, without differences in overt attention. However, anxiety was also associated with greater familiarity with threat words, and the parafoveal priming effects were significantly reduced when familiarity was covaried out. To further examine the role of word knowledge, in Experiment 2, vocabulary and word familiarity were equated for low- and high-anxiety groups. In these conditions, the parafoveal threat–anxiety advantage disappeared. This suggests that the enhanced covert-attention effect depends on familiarity with words.     

Processing efficiency in anxiety: Evidence from eye-movements during visual search

It is generally held that anxiety is characterized by an attentional bias for threatening information. In recent years there has been an important debate whether these biases reside at the level of attentional selection (threat detection) or attentional processing after threat detection (attentional disengagement). In a visual search task containing emotional facial expressions, eye-movements were examined before and after threat detection in high and low trait anxious individuals to further elucidate the temporal unfolding of attentional bias. Results indicated that high-anxious individuals neither showed facilitated orienting to threat nor impaired disengagement of visual attention from threat. Interestingly, the presence of threat in the visual search display was associated with increased decision times in high-anxious individuals. These results challenge some of the current views on attentional bias to threat but indicate that emotional information reduces processing efficiency in anxiety.     

Internalising symptoms and verbal working memory in school‐age children: A processing efficiency analysis

The current study investigated differential contributions of internalising symptoms (state anxiety, trait anxiety, depression) to school‐age children's verbal short‐term (STM) and working memory (WM) span accuracy and efficiency (microanalysis of response times). Children's (N = 125, M_age = 11.44 years) STM/WM was assessed with simple/complex span tasks. Our analyses revealed that: (a) children with high levels of state anxiety displayed reduced simple span accuracy (on Word span) and poorer efficiency on both simple (preparatory intervals, interword pauses) and complex span (preparatory intervals) response time segments; (b) trait anxiety was a negative predictor of children's complex span accuracy, as well as their efficiency on both simple (word durations) and complex span (interword pauses) response time measures; (3) depressive symptoms predicted longer simple span interword pauses. Findings indicate that while all internalising symptoms were predictive of children's poorer memory search efficiency, especially during the “silent”, executive intervals (interword pauses), anxiety symptoms were specifically predictive of children's impaired span accuracy and other efficiency indicators (preparatory intervals, word durations). The study highlights the differential contributions of state, trait anxiety, and depressive symptoms to STM/WM in children, emphasising the need to measure both accuracy and efficiency to assess the role that such symptoms play in children's performance.     

The effect of trait anxiety and mood manipulation on the breadth of attention

Eysenck (1992) predicts that among trait‐anxious individuals high levels of state anxiety broaden the attentional beam in order to facilitate the detection of threat. An experiment was therefore conducted to investigate the interactive role of trait anxiety and mood manipulation on attentional broadening. Target material varying in threat‐relatedness and concern‐relevance was presented to participants' central (parafoveal) and peripheral visual field. Whilst a mood manipulation was associated with a broadening of the attentional beam, it occurred irrespective of trait anxiety. However, differences in the processing of target material were determined by an interaction between trait anxiety and the mood manipulation. Specifically, when placed in an anxiety‐provoking mood manipulation, those high in anxiety increased in their vigilance for concern‐relevant threatening material. These results are discussed in light of Eysenck's hypervigilance theory of anxiety and attention. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

特质焦虑大学生注意偏向的实验研究

焦虑与注意偏向的研究是近年来情绪与认知领域的热点.本研究采用点探测和线索靶子两个实验任务来探讨特质焦虑大学生注意偏向的特点及其内在机制.结果表明:(1)高特质焦虑大学生对负性情绪词附近靶刺激的反应时显著短于中性和正性情绪词附近的靶刺激.表现出一种对负性刺激的注意偏向.而低特质焦虑大学生没有出现注意偏向;(2)高低特质焦虑大学生在有效线索情况下反应时没有显著差异;在无效线索情况下.高特质焦虑大学生对以负性情绪词为线索的靶刺激反应时显著长于对其他靶刺激的反应时,表现出一种对负性刺激的空间注意的解除困难.因此,高特质焦虑个体对负性刺激的注意偏向是一种注意解除困难.     

Attention allocation in social anxiety during a speech

Cognitive models assume that social anxiety is associated with and maintained by biased information processing, leading to change in attention allocation, which can be measured by examining eye movement. However, little is known about the distribution of attention among positive, neutral and negative stimuli during a social task and the relative importance of positive versus negative biases in social anxiety. In this study, eye movement, subjective state anxiety and psychophysiology of individuals with high trait social anxiety (HSA) and low trait social anxiety (LSA) were measured during a speech task with a pre-recorded audience. The HSA group showed longer total fixation on negative stimuli and shorter total fixation on positive stimuli compared to the LSA group. We observed that the LSA group shifted attention away from negative stimuli, whereas the HSA group showed no differential attention allocation. The total duration of fixation on negative stimuli predicted subjective anxiety ratings. These results point to a negative bias as well as a lack of a positive bias in HSA individuals during social threat.     

Effects of anxiety and attention control on processing pictorial and linguistic emotional information

This study investigated the role of executive attention control in modulating selective processing of emotional information in anxiety. It was hypothesized that the combination of high anxiety and poor attention control would be associated with greater difficulty in ignoring task-irrelevant threat-related information. The study included both faces and words as stimuli. Cognitive interference effects were assessed using two emotional Stroop tasks: one with angry, fearful, happy and neutral faces, and one with threat-related, positive, and neutral words. An objective measure of attention control was obtained from the Attention network task. There were four participant groups with high/low trait anxiety and high/low attention control. Results indicated that the combination of high anxiety and poor attention control was associated with greater cognitive interference by emotional faces (including angry faces), compared to neutral faces. This interference effect was not evident in participants with high anxiety and high attentional control, or in low-anxious individuals. There was no evidence of associations between anxiety, attention control, and the interference effect of emotional words. Results indicate that high anxiety and poor attention control together predict enhanced processing of emotionally salient information, such as angry facial expressions. Implications for models of emotion processing are discussed.     

Effects of stress and anxiety on the processing of threat stimuli

Two experiments extended the work of MacLeod and Mathews (1988) and examined whether a cognitive bias for threat information is a function of state or trait anxiety. Color-naming and attention deployment tasks were used to assess the effects of a stress manipulation procedure on attentional responses in high and low trait anxious subjects. Subjects under high stress selectively allocated processing resources toward threat stimuli, irrespective of their trait anxiety level. There was no consistent evidence of a cognitive bias associated with trait anxiety, and the effect of the stress manipulation did not appear to be mediated by state anxiety. It was suggested that trait factors do not modify attentional biases associated with acute stress, but may influence such biases when stress is prolonged.     

Evidence for spontaneous serial refreshing in verbal working memory?

Working memory (WM) keeps information temporarily accessible for ongoing cognition. One proposed mechanism to keep information active in WM is refreshing. This mechanism is assumed to operate by bringing memory items into the focus of attention, thereby serially refreshing the content of WM. We report two experiments in which we examine evidence for the spontaneous occurrence of serial refreshing in verbal WM. Participants had to remember series of red letters, while black probe letters were presented between these memory items, with each probe to be judged present in or absent from the list presented so far, as quickly as possible (i.e., the probe–span task). Response times to the probes were used to infer the status of the representations in WM and, in particular, to examine whether the content of the focus of attention changed over time, as would be expected if serial refreshing occurs spontaneously during inter-item pauses. In sharp contrast with this hypothesis, our results indicate that the last-presented memory item remained in the focus of attention during the inter-item pauses of the probe–span task. We discuss how these findings help to define the boundary conditions of spontaneous refreshing of verbal material in WM, and discuss implications for verbal WM maintenance and forgetting.     

Working memory load can both improve and impair selective attention: Evidence from the Navon paradigm

Selective attention to relevant targets has been shown to depend on the availability of working memory (WM). Under conditions of high WM load, processing of irrelevant distractors is enhanced. Here we showed that this detrimental effect of WM load on selective attention efficiency is reversed when the task requires global- rather than local-level processing. Participants were asked to attend to either the local or the global level of a hierarchical Navon stimulus while keeping either a low or a high load in WM. In line with previous findings, during attention to the local level, distractors at the global level produced more interference under high than under low WM load. By contrast, loading WM had the opposite effect of improving selective attention during attention to the global level. The findings demonstrate that the impact of WM load on selective attention is not invariant, but rather is dependent on the level of the to-be-attended information.     

An electrophysiological model of working memory performance

Working memory (WM) enables us to keep a limited amount of information in active mode. It is believed that attention refreshes necessary information in WM and prevents their forgetting. Despite a plethora of models offered, it is not fully understood that what factors may be involved in forgetfulness and in the required time for refreshing the information. In this study, an electrophysiological model of WM is proposed that consists of several resistor-capacitor units. Inspired of the “resource capacity theory,” attention as a limited source of energy refreshes the voltage level of these units. According to the “time-based resource sharing theory,” only one of these units is allowed to use the limited source of attention at each moment. The source of attention is shared between active units. This model mimics the pattern of several well-known observations of WM such as the recall interval, the word length, and the serial position effect. Some suggestions have been provided about influencing factors in WM performance. Model parameters give the ability of investigating the possible effect of some other factors on WM performance and also a probable prediction about how much information can we chunk?