Abstract
People often need to update representations of information upon discovering them to be incorrect, a process that can be interrupted by competing cognitive demands. Because anxiety and stress can impair cognitive performance, we tested whether looming threat can similarly interfere with the process of updating representations of a statement’s truthfulness. On each trial, participants saw a face paired with a personality descriptor. Each pairing was followed by a signal indicating whether the pairing was “true”, or “false” (a negation of the truth of the statement), and this signal could be followed by a warning of imminent electric shock (i.e., the looming threat). As predicted, threat of shock left memory for “true” pairings intact, while impairing people’s ability to label negated pairings as untrue. Contrary to our predictions, the pattern of errors for pairings that were negated under threat suggested that these mistakes were at least partly attributable to participants forgetting that they saw the negated information at all (rather than being driven by miscategorization of the pairings as true). Consistent with this, linear ballistic accumulator modelling suggested that this impaired recognition stemmed from weaker memory traces rather than decisional processes. We suggest that arousal due to looming threat may interfere with executive processes important for resolving competition between mutually suppressive tags of whether representations in memory are “true” or “false”.
Highlights
People often need to update representations of information upon discovering them to be incorrect, a process that can be interrupted by competing cognitive demands
Follow-up pairwise comparisons revealed that response accuracy was significantly lower for trials in which participants had been informed that a pairing was false while under threat (M = 0.69, SE = 0.02) compared to trials in which participants had been told that a pairing was true while under threat (M = 0.74, SE = 0.02), mean difference (MD) = 0.051, 95% CI [0.009, 0.093], p = 0.017, but that for safe trials the proportion of correct responses for negated (i.e., “false”) trials (M = 0.73, SE = 0.02) did not significantly differ from the proportion of correct responses for non-negated (i.e., “true”) trials (M = 0.72, SE = 0.02), MD = 0.003, 95% CI [−0.036, 0.430], p = 0.866
A significant veracity x valence interaction emerged,1 F(1.88,181.94) = 3.68, p = 0.030, ηp2 = 0.037. Deconstructing this interaction, we found that for positively valenced information, the proportion of correct responses was significantly lower for trials that were negated (M = 0.68, SE = 0.02) compared to non-negated (“true”) trials (M = 0.74, SE = 0.02), MD = −0.05, 95% CI [0.005, 0.100], p = 0.032
Summary
People often need to update representations of information upon discovering them to be incorrect, a process that can be interrupted by competing cognitive demands. We suggest that arousal due to looming threat may interfere with executive processes important for resolving competition between mutually suppressive tags of whether representations in memory are “true” or “false”. The current findings that people have impaired memory for information that is negated during potential threat provide insight into pitfalls that must be avoided when agencies convey information about anxiety-provoking events. Given the scope and seriousness of the COVID-19 crisis, #toiletpapergate is destined to be a footnote to one of the most disruptive events in modern history It serves as an important lesson: in emergencies, the public needs access to information and guidance, and the fast pace of information output means that much of what. The current study aimed to assess the second of these possibilities: that anxious anticipation of an aversive outcome might selectively impair how people process information that they have been told is not true
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