High Visual Working Memory Capacity in Trait Social Anxiety

Working memory capacity is one of the most important cognitive functions influencing individual traits, such as attentional control, fluid intelligence, and also psychopathological traits. Previous research suggests that anxiety is associated with impaired cognitive function, and studies have shown low verbal working memory capacity in individuals with high trait anxiety. However, the relationship between trait anxiety and visual working memory capacity is still unclear. Considering that people allocate visual attention more widely to detect danger under threat, visual working memory capacity might be higher in anxious people. In the present study, we show that visual working memory capacity increases as trait social anxiety increases by using a change detection task. When the demand to inhibit distractors increased, however, high visual working memory capacity diminished in individuals with social anxiety, and instead, impaired filtering of distractors was predicted by trait social anxiety. State anxiety was not correlated with visual working memory capacity. These results indicate that socially anxious people could potentially hold a large amount of information in working memory. However, because of an impaired cognitive function, they could not inhibit goal-irrelevant distractors and their performance decreased under highly demanding conditions

Inhibitory deficits in trait anxiety: increased stimulus-based or response-based interference?

Trait anxiety is associated with an impaired ability to inhibit task-irrelevant distractions. However, distractions may cause conflict at multiple stages within the information-processing stream, which may be resolved by different subsystems, depending on the type of conflict. Here, we contrasted two forms of conflict that have been distinguished in the literature: stimulus–stimulus (SS) versus stimulus–response (SR) competition. Across two experiments, participants completed a Stroop-like task that included distractor color words that could be either a different color promoting the same response as the target (SS interference) or a different color promoting a different response (SR interference). In line with previous studies, anxiety increased overall task-irrelevant distraction, measured by incongruent versus congruent reaction times. Importantly, this increase was driven solely by SR conflict, with no evidence of group differences in SS interference, despite clear within-subjects costs. These results clarify that trait anxiety may modulate inhibitory responses primarily by disrupting the resolution of response competition, while having little effect on stimulus conflict. Additionally, the results highlight the utility of distinguishing forms of conflict resolution, particularly in individual-difference approaches in which inhibition is impaired in a variety of clinical and nonclinical populations

Inhalation of 7.5% carbon dioxide increases alerting and orienting attention network function

Rationale: The development of experimental models that readily translate between animals and humans is required to better integrate and clarify the biological, behavioural and cognitive mechanisms that underlie normal fear and pathological anxiety. Inhalation of low concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) increases anxiety and autonomic arousal in humans, triggers related behaviours in small animals, and increases selective attention to threat in healthy humans. However the effects on broader cognitive (non-emotional) processes that characterize anxiety are not known. Objectives: To examine the effect of 7.5% CO2 inhalation (vs. air) on the efficiency of discrete attention networks implicated in anxiety: alerting (maintaining an alert state), orienting (the selection of information from sensory input) and executive control (resolving cognitive conflict).Methods: 23 healthy human participants completed a computerized Attention Network Test (ANT) during inhalation of 7.5% CO2 enriched and normal/medical air. Gas was administered blind to participants with inhalation order counterbalanced across participants. Measures of heart rate, blood pressure and subjective mood/anxiety were obtained at baseline and following each inhalation period.Results: CO2 inhalation increased anxiety, autonomic arousal and the efficiency of alerting and orienting attention network function. Autonomic response to CO2 correlated with increased orienting; and CO2–induced anxiety, autonomic arousal and orienting network function increased with chronic (trait) anxiety.Conclusions: Evidence that CO2 modulates attention mechanisms involved in the temporal detection and spatial location of salient stimuli converges with evidence that CO2 triggers fear behaviour in animals via direct innervation of a distributed neural network that facilitates environmental hypervigilance. <br/