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Working Memory and Test Anxiety
Working memory is essential for understanding the phenomenon of test anxiety. Working memory is a limited capacity system, so the addition of stress and anxiety reduces the resources available to focus on relevant information. By identifying cognitive interventions, it is possible to reverse the effects of test anxiety.

The goal of most testing situations is to measure a person’s level of knowledge or skill in a particular area. If the testing situation itself becomes a factor in that person’s ability to reach optimal achievement, then there can be negative consequences, especially if certain groups are disproportionally affected. Test anxiety refers to impaired performance created by feelings of stress and discomfort in evaluative situations.

Psychologists Liebert and Morris originally attributed test anxiety to two main components: worry and emotionality. Worry refers to cognitive factors, such as negative expectations or feelings of inadequacy, and emotionality refers to the physical symptoms, such as increased heart rate, muscle tension, or butterflies. Both are aversive elements that can create anxiety, but it is the cognitive factors that have the strongest connection to performance.



It is important to understand the elements of working memory before connecting them to test anxiety. Baddeley's model of working memory was developed to improve the understanding of the memory system. The central executive, phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, and episodic buffer are the main mechanisms that work together to allow temporary storage and early processing of information. As indicated by the diagram, the central executive allocates attentional resources to other components. Additionally, the phonological loop refers to the temporary storage of verbal information, and the visuospatial sketchpad is responsible for the storage of visual information. Finally, the episodic buffer holds information temporarily, and integrates it back into the central executive.

Working Memory and Emotion
As discussed previously, people who suffer from test anxiety are more likely to experience negative cognitions while in evaluative situations. These thoughts and emotions that interfere with the central executive and create distracting task-irrelevant activity, which uses working memory resources. This is especially important because test anxious persons have been shown to bias their attention towards threatening and anxiety related stimuli more than nonemotional stimuli.

According to the attentional capture hypothesis, emotional stimuli create specific attention demands. They will often dominate a person’s thoughts, and any attempt to suppress them will require additional working memory resources. When the central executive is divides resources between the aversive cognitions and the task-relevant material, then the person’s ability to use the relevant information on a test will suffer.

Attentional Control Theory of Working Memory
A recent theory involving anxiety and working memory is the Attentional Control Theory. Research by Derakshan and Eysenck found that anxiety largely impairs the processing efficiency aspect of working memory rather than the performance effectiveness component. Processing efficiency refers to the amount of resources used to attain effective performance. Therefore, this theory suggests that students high in test anxiety will have to allocate more resources to the task at hand than non-test anxiety students in order to achieve the same results.

Attentional Control Theory also assumes that anxiety primarily affects functioning of the central executive component of working memory rather than the phonological loop or visuospatial sketchpad. Specifically anxiety affects the attentional control aspect of the central executive and its inhibition and attentional shifting functions. Attentional control is the balance between the two attentional systems, the goal-directed system and the stimulus-driven system. Research suggests that anxiety disrupts the balance between the two systems, therefore causing a reduction in the processing efficiency of the central executive.

Pressure and Performance Theories
There are are two important theories that attempt to explain compromised performance. The first theory is called Distraction Theory. This theory states that high-pressure environments create a dual-task situation, in which the person’s attention is divided between the task at hand and unhelpful thoughts about the situation and possible negative consequences of poor performance. .. The irrelevant thoughts compete for working memory resources, which reduces the efficiency of their memory retrieval often leading to “choking under pressure.”.

According to a different theory, when a person is expected to perform a specific skill, the pressure may cause an increased self-consciousness and inward focus, which can disrupt their ability to successfully perform that task. This is called Explicit Monitoring Theory, which says that thinking about step-by-step procedures can inhibit one’s ability to execute a task. For example, a study by R. Gray found that baseball players put into the high-pressure condition had increased errors, and an increased ability to recall details like the direction their bat was moving. This indicates that the pressured players were monitoring themselves more, which impacted their ability to successfully hit the ball.

Working Memory Capacity
When people are in high-stakes situations, it impacts individual performance in some unexpected ways. In general, people with higher working memory capacity do better on academic tasks, but this changes when people are under pressure. A study by Beilock et. al tested participants using a modular arithmetic test to conclude that adding pressure will actually decrease the performance of those with high-working memory, but will not lower the performance of those with low-working memory. In other words, those with higher working-memory capacity are more vulnerable in anxiety-producing situations. Beilock states that people with high WM are more likely to use cognitively demanding procedures to solve the problems. These difficult procedures require greater working memory resources, which have difficulty competing with the increase in task-irrelevant interferences. These findings clearly demonstrate the relationship between stressful situations and individual working memory capacity.

There is some contradictory evidence to support the theory that individuals with a high working memory capacity are somewhat buffered against the effects of performance anxiety. A study by Johnson and Gronlund found that individuals' performances on a task showed a significant decrease in accuracy when the participant had low or average working memory capacity, but did not significantly decrease when the participant had a high level of working memory. Further research found that participants with both lower working memory capacity and high test anxiety were more prone to error.

Category Learning
It is not possible to understand the relationship between working memory and test anxiety without exploring the types of learning situations that require working memory resources. Decaro et. al tested the effects of different task categories on the performance of both high and low working memory individuals. In this study, the categories were either rule-based, which relies heavily on working memory, and information-integration, which incorporates more procedural methods. The data show that those with high levels of working memory excelled at rule-based tasks, and those with low working memory excelled at information-integration tasks. When attempting to do procedural tasks, the individuals with high WM were less successful then those with low WM. This indicates that the type of task is an important factor when examining working memory and performance.

Pressure Situation
Many have asked the question: which is more accurate, the Distraction Theory, or the Explicit Monitoring Theory? The full answer is still in need of future exploration, but preliminary research demonstrates the importance of how the individual perceives their evaluative situation. The two types of pressure situation include: monitoring pressure, in which an individual’s performance is negatively impacted due to the presence of an audience, and outcome pressure, in which an individual’s performance suffers because he or she is thinking about the implications of the testing results. Decaro et. al incorporated the earlier findings on category learning to test this phenomenon. They found that rule-based performance was hurt by outcome pressure, but not monitoring pressure, while information-integration performance was hurt by monitoring pressure, but not outcome pressure. In other words, outcomes pressure influences performance on tasks that are reliant on working memory, while monitoring pressure negatively impacts tasks that are more procedural. These findings indicate that performance is compromised in different ways depending on the type of task, and the types of pressure. Knowing this, it is important to pinpoint the exact type of test-anxiety that an individual is experiencing, in order to find the best solution for enhancing their performance.

Interventions Using Working Memory Related Techniques
One cognitive intervention that has been shown to be effective at reducing anxiety is attentional cognitive bias modification. The main method used to study the intervention is a dot-probe paradigm. In this method, participants view negative and neutral stimuli on a screen and respond only to the neutral stimulus. This method attempts to overcome the attentional bias shown by high anxiety participants, who tend to focus on the more potent negative stimuli rather than the neutral stimuli. When participants are trained to focus on the neutral stimuli while ignoring the negative stimuli, working memory capacity is less strained and is available to place more focus on the task at hand.

Cognitive interventions in general do have many limitations. Some cognitive strategies have even been shown to be detrimental to performance, particularly strategies such as thought suppression. Only a small, recent body of research addresses cognitive interventions, and more research needs to be done to support these new techniques.

References