Searching for answers in an uncertain world: Meaning threats lead to increased working memory capacity.

Daniel Randles,Eva Van Den Bussche,Jason P Martens,Steven J Heine,Rachele Benjamin

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0204640

Daniel Randles, Eva Van Den Bussche + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0204640

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Abstract

The Meaning Maintenance Model posits that individuals seek to resolve uncertainty by searching for patterns in the environment, yet little is known about how this is accomplished. Four studies investigated whether uncertainty has an effect on people’s cognitive functioning. In particular, we investigated whether meaning threats lead to increased working memory capacity. In each study, we exposed participants to either an uncertain stimulus used to threaten meaning in past studies, or a control stimulus. Participants then completed a working memory measure, where they either had to recall lists of words (Studies 1, 2), or strings of digits (Studies 3, 4). We used both a frequentist approach and Bayesian analysis to evaluate our findings. Across the four studies, we find a small but consistent effect, where participants in the meaning threat condition show improved performance on the working memory tasks. Overall, our findings were consistent with the hypothesis that working memory capacity increases when people experience a meaning threat, which may help to explain improved pattern recognition. Additionally, our results highlight the value of using a Bayesian analytic approach, particularly when studying phenomena with high variance.

Highlights

For the most part, our worlds unfold as we expect
Given that anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) activation has been found to predict executive functioning [50,68,69], and given that theories of the behavioral inhibition system (BIS) suggest that conflict detection is associated with increased vigilance [60], it follows that meaning threats might lead people to engage in more careful processing of stimuli in their environment
For the Bayesian analysis, we assigned priors as follows: the intercept was defined with a mean based on the normal distribution, and a standard deviation uniformly distributed from 0–2

Summary

Introduction

Our worlds unfold as we expect. It rarely snows in the summer, fire tends to be hot, generally our friends don’t try to hurt us, and when we go to bed at night, we expect to wake up in the morning. In other words, detecting an anomaly that leads to error triggers greater control and greater expectation that anomalies will occur, which in turn reduces both ACC activation in response to anomalies and the likelihood of making an error This is the process that we speculate is most at play during abstraction, though we acknowledge that meaning threats produce a variety of other responses (for example, affirmation) that may result from activation of this neural region; much of the threat defense literature agrees that anomalies elicit anxiety, or other negatively-valenced experiences (see [2,12]) and often cite the ACC as the origin of this response (e.g., [51,12,2]). Given that ACC activation has been found to predict executive functioning [50,68,69], and given that theories of the BIS suggest that conflict detection is associated with increased vigilance [60], it follows that meaning threats might lead people to engage in more careful processing of stimuli in their environment. This presents us with a unique opportunity to estimate the size of our effect using Bayesian statistics, evaluating support for our theoretical perspective as well as support for the null

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Discussion