High Visual Working Memory Capacity in Trait Social Anxiety

Moriya, Jun; Sugiura, Yoshinori · 2012 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0034244

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Summary

This study investigates the relationship between trait social anxiety and visual working memory capacity, addressing a gap in literature that has primarily focused on verbal working memory deficits in anxious individuals. While previous research suggests anxiety depletes cognitive resources, the authors hypothesize that individuals with high trait social anxiety may possess higher visual working memory capacity due to a wider allocation of visual attention to detect potential threats. The study specifically distinguishes between trait anxiety (a stable personality characteristic) and state anxiety (transient emotional state), predicting that trait social anxiety, but not state anxiety, would correlate with visual working memory performance. The researchers conducted three experiments using change-detection tasks to measure visual working memory capacity in university students. Participants viewed arrays of visual stimuli (colored squares in Experiment 1; oriented rectangles in Experiments 2 and 3) and identified whether a subsequent test array was identical or different. Experiment 3 introduced task-irrelevant distractors to assess filtering efficiency. Trait social anxiety was measured using the Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale, while state and trait anxiety were assessed via the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. Visual working memory capacity was estimated using standard formulas based on hit and false alarm rates. The results demonstrated a significant positive correlation between trait social anxiety and visual working memory capacity in the absence of distractors (Experiments 1 and 2, and no-distractor conditions in Experiment 3). State anxiety showed no significant correlation with memory capacity. However, when task-irrelevant distractors were present (Experiment 3), the positive relationship between trait social anxiety and memory capacity disappeared. Instead, trait social anxiety was significantly negatively correlated with filtering efficiency, indicating that individuals with high social anxiety struggled to inhibit irrelevant stimuli. This impairment in top-down control meant that their high memory resources were allocated to both relevant and irrelevant information, reducing performance under demanding conditions. The findings suggest that individuals with high trait social anxiety possess high visual working memory capacity but suffer from impaired inhibitory control. This combination allows them to hold large amounts of visual information simultaneously, including potential threats, but prevents them from filtering out goal-irrelevant distractors. The study concludes that while socially anxious individuals may have superior capacity for maintaining visual representations, their inability to suppress irrelevant information leads to cognitive inefficiency in complex environments. These results highlight the importance of distinguishing between memory capacity and filtering efficiency in understanding the cognitive profiles of anxiety disorders.

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• cognitive capacity variation