Anticipating your own performance at work or school may hinder your ability to remember what happened before your presentation, a study from the University of Waterloo has found.
The study’s findings also suggest that the presence of an audience may be an important factor that contributes to this pre-performance memory deficit.
“Performance anticipation could weaken memory because people tend to focus on the details of their upcoming presentation instead of paying attention to information that occurs before their performance,” says lead author Noah Forrin, a postdoctoral fellow in Psychology at Waterloo.
“People who experience performance anxiety may be particularly likely to experience this phenomenon.”
Building on what previous research called the next-in-line effect, Forrin and his co-authors explored how different ways of preparing for a presentation impact the pre-performance memory deficit.
They experimented with a variety of techniques that enhance memory, including the production effect, which is the simple yet powerful idea that we can remember something best if we say it aloud.
They experimented with a variety of techniques that enhance memory, including the production effect, which is the simple yet powerful idea that we can remember something best if we say it aloud.
One of the study’s co-authors, Psychology professor Colin MacLeod, coined the term production effect from previous research which identified that reading aloud involves at least three distinct processes that help to encode memory: articulation, audition, and self-reference.
Research by Forrin and MacLeod has demonstrated that reading aloud is better for memory than reading silently, writing, or hearing another person speak aloud.
In the new study, however, the findings suggest that the production effect has a downside: When people anticipate reading out loud, they may have worse memory for information that they encounter before reading aloud.
The researchers conducted four experiments with 400 undergraduate students and found that students have worse memory for words that they read silently when they anticipate having to read upcoming words aloud (compared to when they anticipate having to read upcoming words silently).
“Our results show that performance anticipation may be detrimental to effective memory encoding strategies,” said Forrin. “Students frequently have upcoming performances–whether for class presentations or the expectation of class participation.”
“We are currently examining whether the anticipation of those future performances reduces students’ learning and memory in the classroom.”
One strategy to avoid pre-performance memory deficits, says Forrin, is “try to get your performance over with by being the first student in class (or employee in a meeting) to present. After that, you can focus on others’ presentations without anticipating your own.”
Cognitive performance can be affected by a number of factors, including non-cognitive ones like the emotional state of the test-taker (Gray, 2001; Owens et al., 2012; Storbeck, 2012; Luck and Vogel, 2013).
In the emotional sphere, major factors that can affect demanding cognitive performance include stress and anxiety.
While more pronounced symptoms on each of these two factors are clearly linked to impaired cognitive performance (Sandi, 2013; Maloney et al., 2014; Moran, 2016), their effects are less clear when testing cognition in non-clinical populations. However, for both theoretical and practical purposes, it is essential to know whether even normal variability in stress and anxiety has an impact on cognition.
This is relevant also for working memory (WM) that represents a core cognitive function. It is a limited-capacity temporary memory storage system that is constantly updated (Baddeley, 2003).
It serves as a mental platform for ongoing activities, being crucial for purposeful behavior and flexible interaction with the environment. WM is an object of extensive study both for basic research and for clinical assessment, and it is thus important to clarify factors that affect WM performance. In the present study, we examined the relationships between WM performance and stress and anxiety in a large non-depressed adult sample.
Working Memory and Anxiety
Anxiety is a state of heightened vigilance (Grillon, 2002) that is associated with an increase in overall sensory sensitivity due to uncertainty or conflict (Gray, 2001; Cornwell et al., 2007; Eysenck et al., 2007; Grupe and Nitschke, 2013).
A characteristic feature of anxiety is the limited control over worrying thoughts and attentional biases, contributing to a greater focus on negative stimuli (Matthews and Wells, 1996). It has been shown that anxiety disrupts cognitive performance (Maloney et al., 2014), including WM (Moran, 2016). This relationship works both ways, as cognitive impairment can lead to increased anxiety (Petkus et al., 2017).
In this study, we focused on self-reported state anxiety, the immediate sensation of feeling anxious, rather than temporally stable trait anxiety.
The attentional control theory, proposed by Eysenck et al. (2007), suggests that state anxiety impairs cognitive performance by giving greater influence to the stimulus-driven (bottom-up) attentional system. The greater the anxiety, the more disruption this causes.
A later paper on attentional control theory suggests that anxiety might affect only the executive component of WM (Eysenck and Derakshan, 2011): in a dual-task study of anxiety, the primary WM task performance in high anxious individuals decreased only if the additional task required executive control (Eysenck et al., 2005; see also Christopher and MacDonald, 2005). A study by Gustavson and Miyake (2016) showed that worry is also associated with impaired WM updating.
A recent meta-analysis by Moran (2016) examined the relationship between anxiety and WM capacity. Based on 177 samples, this meta-analysis on correlative studies found a moderate but reliable association so that higher anxiety was related to lower WM performances (overall Hedge’s g = -0.334).
This held across anxiety type (state, trait), sample type (clinical, non-clinical), WM task paradigm (simple span, complex span, n-back), and WM content (spatial, phonological, visual).
These findings speak for a rather general relationship that could be fitted to the attentional control account. However, Moran (2016) highlights various limitations of this research, including reliance on single measures of WM that makes it impossible to separate task-specific and task-general effects. Thus far, there have been no studies examining the relationships between state anxiety and WM domains at latent variable level.
WM and Stress
In terms of both emotional components and the underlying neurocircuitry, there is a significant overlap between stress and anxiety, but stress encompasses both avoidant (anxious) and proactive responses. In turn, fear and anxiety can be experienced even in the absence of the neuroendocrine cascade that is related to stress reaction (Miller and O’Callaghan, 2002), just as stress does not necessarily entail experiencing fear or anxiety (Shin and Liberzon, 2010).
As regards cognitive effects, it appears that stress and anxiety behave in similar ways: it has been shown that under stress, controlled attention resources are reduced as they are allocated to the potential threat (Klein and Boals, 2001). However, the inverted-U theory of acute stress (Mizoguchi et al., 2000; Muse et al., 2003; Sandi, 2013; Sapolsky, 2015) states that this effect depends on stress levels related to the test situation: moderate stress may enhance cognitive performance, while both low (unmotivating) and high (overwhelming) stress are associated with a decline in performance. Indeed, Lewis et al. (2008) observed improvement in WM performance in the presence of mild acute stressors.
The experimental studies cited above investigated the role of acute stress, but research addressing the cognitive implications of self-reported daily stress has primarily reported negative effects. Wu and Yan (2017) state that chronic stress may negatively affect neuroplasticity and learning. Sliwinski et al. (2006) studied within-person variability of everyday stressors (as opposed to major stressful life events, see Klein and Boals, 2001) and their effect on cognition in young and older adults on six separate occasions. Daily stress predicted variability in response times on a WM updating task in both groups, while only the older group showed negative effects of heightened stress on an attention task. Moreover, stress affected only the more difficult and demanding attention task variant.
These findings support the attention depletion hypothesis, suggesting that even everyday stressors may decrease WM and attentional resources. Stawski et al. (2006) conducted a similar study with older adults, arguing that stress impaired cognition through intrusive thoughts and avoidant thinking that appear in response to stressful situations.
In young adults, decreased performance on WM updating has been related to negative affect, motivational problems, and reduced attentional control, which are key features in experiencing anxiety or negative stress (Brose et al., 2012). Similarly, work-related stress negatively affected cognitive performance in a sample of Latino workers (Nguyen et al., 2012).
A cohort study by Tun et al. (2013) revealed that social strain had the greatest effect on the cognitive performance of those who had low baseline cognitive abilities. Petrac et al. (2009) reported a moderate positive correlation between everyday stress and error rates on attention tasks (both auditory and visual) in undergraduate students, but also a negative correlation between state anxiety and error rates. Thus, while even mild everyday stressors can have an impact on cognitive functioning, there seem to be moderating factors that we are only beginning to understand.
Aims of the Present Study
The short literature review above indicates that WM performance can be sensitive to stress- or anxiety-related interference. These effects have been extensively studied in clinical and older adult populations. However, less is known about the effects of stress and anxiety on WM in non-depressed adult populations.
This lack of research is baffling given the increasing prevalence of stress in a working age population (Wiegner et al., 2015). Experiencing stress and feelings of anxiety are common in otherwise healthy populations, but we know very little about how these mental states are associated with cognitive performance. Many previous studies are also hampered by the fact that they have used only single WM measures (e.g., Moran, 2016). Therefore, the present exploratory study investigated the relationships between WM performance and stress and state anxiety in a large non-depressed adult sample by using questionnaires and an extensive WM test battery including both verbal and visuospatial task variants.
Source:
University of Waterloo
Media Contacts:
Matthew Grant – University of Waterloo
Image Source:
The image is in the public domain.
Original Research: Closed access
“Wait for it… performance anticipation reduces recognition memory”. Forrin, Brandon C.W. Ralph, Navi K. Dhaliwal, Daniel Smilek, and MacLeod.
Journal of Memory and Language doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104050.
