Elucidating the relationship between anxiety and working memory: An examination of domain-general and domain-specific interference
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Date
2024-06
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University of New Brunswick
Abstract
While research consistently links high levels of anxiety to poor working memory performance, the underlying mechanisms of this relationship have been widely debated. Under Processing Efficiency Theory/Attention Control Theory (Eysenck & Calvo, 1992), the relationship is said to reflect domain-general interference, where anxiety disrupts broad central executive functions within working memory (e.g., filtering irrelevant stimuli). Conversely, proponents of the Two Component Model (Vytal et al., 2012) argue for domain-specific interference, where specific aspects of anxiety (i.e., worry and arousal) interfere with specific working memory domains (i.e., phonological and visuospatial, respectively). The current research compared these two models and considered Moran’s (2016) claim that the models are complementary. Undergraduate students (N=60) completed a simple change detection task to examine baseline working memory capacity and a complex change detection task to examine filtering efficiency. These tasks were completed with both phonological (words) stimuli and visuospatial (faces) stimuli. In the complex change detection task, participants were instructed to remember target stimuli while ignoring distractor stimuli, the latter of which were either neutral or threatening (i.e., negatively valenced) in nature. Participants also self-reported their levels of trait arousal and trait worry. Linear mixed effects model comparisons were conducted across phonological and visuospatial versions of the simple and the complex change detection task. Results from the complex change detection task with phonological stimuli highlight a domain-general relationship between worry and working memory. Results from the complex change detection task with visuospatial stimuli highlight domain-specific interference of arousal with visuospatial working memory in terms of accuracy, but a domain-general relationship was observed between arousal and processing efficiency (i.e., response time). Examination of performance on the baseline change detection task revealed no support for explanatory models. Regression analyses highlighted unique predictive effects of baseline working memory storage capacity on filtering efficiency as a function of stimulus type (i.e., phonological versus visuospatial) and nature of distractors (i.e., threat or neutral). Implications of results in terms of elucidating the nature of the relationship between trait anxiety (i.e., worry and arousal) and working memory are considered, along with discussion of limitations and directions for future research in this area.