The role of verbalisations and anxiety in task switching

It has been suggested that being anxious can occupy verbal working memory, a type of memory required for goal activation in cognitively intensive tasks. Likewise, during these tasks it has been found that boosting task related verbal working memory have been found to improve performance, e.g., listening to or reading aloud instructions (Kirkham et al., 2012). This experiment seeks to
replicate the previous work whilst accounting for trait anxiety. We used a task-switching alternating runs paradigm where auditory and visual instructions appeared simultaneously. Participants had to follow either the auditory or visual cue in separate blocks, whilst ignoring the counterpart. The distractor cue could be congruent or incongruent with the target rule. Results showed that low
anxious individuals greatly benefit from auditory cues, whilst high anxious individuals saw no differences. The data suggests that the verbal working memory used for cognitive control is based more in phonological grounding, and that anxious individuals do not benefit from hearing task instructions as they are already engaged in phonological ruminations.