Electrophysiological Measures of Visual Working Memory in Social Anxiety

Yuan, Jing; Yuan, Jing; Mao, Ningning; Chen, Rongrong; Zhang, Qin; Cui, Lixia · 2020 · DOAJ

DOI: 10.3389/fnbeh.2020.00049

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Summary

This study investigates the influence of social anxiety on visual working memory (VWM) capacity, addressing a gap in understanding how socially anxious individuals process non-emotional stimuli. While social anxiety is known to cause attentional biases toward threatening information, it remains unclear whether this reflects a deficit in attentional control or an allocation of excessive cognitive resources. The authors hypothesized that individuals with high social anxiety (HSA) would exhibit greater VWM capacity than those with low social anxiety (LSA), potentially compensating for inhibitory deficits by maintaining more information in memory. The researchers employed a change-detection task to measure VWM while recording event-related potentials (ERPs) from 34 participants (17 HSA and 17 LSA), categorized based on Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale scores. Participants viewed memory arrays of colored squares in either the left or right visual hemifield under two conditions: low load (two items) and high load (four items). After a delay, they determined if the test array matched the memory array. The primary electrophysiological measure was Contralateral Delay Activity (CDA), a negative slow-wave during the delay period that indexes the amount of information maintained in VWM. Behavioral performance was assessed using the K-value formula to estimate memory capacity. Behavioral results showed no significant difference in VWM capacity (K-values) between HSA and LSA groups across either memory load condition. However, electrophysiological analysis revealed a significant interaction between group and memory load. Specifically, under the high-memory load condition (four items), HSA individuals exhibited significantly larger (more negative) CDA amplitudes compared to LSA individuals, indicating greater neural activity associated with maintaining visual information. No significant difference in CDA was observed between groups under the low-memory load condition (two items), likely due to a ceiling effect where performance was near-perfect for both groups. The findings suggest that individuals with high social anxiety possess greater VWM resources, allowing them to maintain more information in memory than their low-anxiety counterparts. This supports the attentional control theory, which posits that anxiety impairs inhibitory control, leading individuals to allocate excessive resources to monitor the environment for threats. The dissociation between behavioral accuracy and neural activity implies that HSA individuals may store more information but do not necessarily extract or utilize it more effectively, resulting in comparable behavioral performance. The study concludes that social anxiety may enhance VWM capacity as a compensatory mechanism for attentional deficits, providing evidence for processing efficiency theory and suggesting that interventions focusing on attentional control could mitigate social anxiety symptoms.

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• working memory