Anxiety and the motivational basis of working memory

Anxiety constrains cognition by biasing attention toward the anticipation of threat. The biological basis of this influence may be seen in the evolutionary progression of vertebrate defensive behavior away from simple reflexes aid toward increasing neural mediation between threat stimulus and behavioral response. In mammalian brains with larger frontal lobes the mediation becomes complex; limbic motivational circuits, which extend into prefrontal areas, operate to constrain the corticolimbic consolidation of memory. In humans, hemispheric specialization and the extensive elaboration of limbic cortex in the frontal lobes may provide clues to the unique ways that human motivational controls shape memory and cognition. By focusing attention, anxiety may play a key role in the analytic cognition believed to be subsumed by the left hemisphere. By bringing the defensive affective posture from limbic structures to bear upon the frontal lobe's organization of working memory, anxiety may be particularly important to the ongoing feedback control of the cognitive process. The study of neural mechanisms suggests that anxiety is not simply a distraction to the cognitive apparatus; it may be fundamental to motivating cognition adaptively.