INTERACTIVE EFFECTS OF TRAIT AND STATE ANXIETY ON VISUAL SPATIAL WORKING MEMORY CAPACITY

Anxiety is associated with low visual spatial working memory capacity (VSWMC) in the presence of task-irrelevant distractors. Because anxious individuals have difficulty suppressing processing of distractors, VSWMC is depleted. However, results of association between anxiety and VSWMC in the absence of distractors are inconsistent among previous studies. In the present study, distinct roles of trait and state anxiety were focused. The present study investigated the interactive effects of trait and state anxiety on VSWMC without distractors using a change detection task. In the task, a memory array of oriented bars to be encoded was presented followed by a test array, and participants were required to answer whether the test array was identical to or different from the memory array. Orientation of one bar changed largely (i.e., low-precision condition) in Experiment 1 and slightly (high-precision condition) in Experiment 2. In Experiment 1, the interactive effects of trait and state anxiety on VSWMC were observed. VSWMC was positively associated with state anxiety when trait anxiety was low, whereas VSWMC was negatively associated with state anxiety when trait anxiety was high. These interactive effects were not observed under high-precision condition in Experiment 2, in which VSWMC was negatively correlated with state anxiety irrespective of trait anxiety. These results indicated that under low-precision condition, high state anxiety widely allocate working-memory resources and VSWMC becomes high. However, because high trait anxious individuals have difficulty controlling allocation of working-memory resources, high trait anxiety decreases VSWMC under high state anxiety. Under high-precision condition, it is necessary to allocate working-memory resources narrowly to detect slight change. Because of wide allocation of working-memory resources in high state anxious individuals, state anxiety is negatively correlated with VSWMC under high-precision condition.