Swinburne
Browse

The complex interaction between anxiety and cognition: Insight from spatial and verbal working memory

Download (2.14 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2024-07-09, 13:44 authored by Katherine E. Vytal, Brian Cornwell, Allison M. Letkiewicz, Nicole E. Arkin, Christian Grillon
Anxiety can be distracting, disruptive, and incapacitating. Despite problems with empirical replication of this phenomenon, one fruitful avenue of study has emerged from working memory (WM) experiments where a translational method of anxiety induction (risk of shock) has been shown to disrupt spatial and verbal WM performance. Performance declines when resources (e.g., spatial attention, executive function) devoted to goal-directed behaviors are consumed by anxiety. Importantly, it has been shown that anxiety-related impairments in verbal WM depend on task difficulty, suggesting that cognitive load may be an important consideration in the interaction between anxiety and cognition. Here we use both spatial and verbal WM paradigms to probe the effect of cognitive load on anxiety-induced WM impairment across task modality. Subjects performed a series of spatial and verbal n-back tasks of increasing difficulty (1, 2, and 3-back) while they were either safe or at risk for shock. Startle reflex was used to probe anxiety. Results demonstrate that induced-anxiety differentially impacts verbal and spatial WM, such that low and medium-load verbal WM is more susceptible to anxiety-related disruption relative to high-load, and spatial WM is disrupted regardless of task difficulty. Anxiety impacts both verbal and spatial processes, as described by correlations between anxiety and performance impairment, albeit the effect on spatial WM is consistent across load. Demanding WM tasks may exert top-down control over higher-order cortical resources engaged by anxious apprehension, however high-load spatial WM may continue to experience additional competition from anxiety-related changes in spatial attention, resulting in impaired performance. By describing this disruption across task modalities, these findings inform current theories of emotion-cognition interactions and may facilitate development of clinical interventions that seek to target cognitive impairments associated with anxiety.

History

Available versions

PDF (Published version)

ISSN

1662-5161

Journal title

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

Volume

7

Issue

MAR

Article number

article no. 93

Pagination

10 pp

Publisher

Frontiers Research Foundation

Copyright statement

Copyright © 2013 Vytal, Cornwell, Letkiewicz, Arkin and Grillon. This an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party graphics etc. The published version is reproduced in accordance with this policy.

Language

eng

Usage metrics

    Publications

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Keywords

    Licence

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC