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. 2020 Apr 17:14:49.
doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2020.00049. eCollection 2020.

Electrophysiological Measures of Visual Working Memory in Social Anxiety

Jing Yuan  1   2 , Ningning Mao  1 , Rongrong Chen  1 , Qin Zhang  1 , Lixia Cui  1
Affiliations

Electrophysiological Measures of Visual Working Memory in Social Anxiety

Jing Yuan et al. Front Behav Neurosci. .

Abstract

Socially anxious individuals are very sensitive to threatening information in the environment, so visual working memory (VWM) is of great significance for them. However, the influence of social anxiety on VWM is unclear. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the VWM in individuals with social anxiety using electrophysiological techniques. Event-related potentials (ERPs) of high socially anxious (HSA) individuals and low socially anxious (LSA) individuals were recorded during a change-detection task with two memory conditions (two and four items). Electrophysiological results indicated that compared with the LSA individuals, the HSA individuals had significantly more active contralateral delay activity (CDA) in condition of memorizing four items. However, there was no significant difference between the HSA and LSA groups in response accuracy in the conditions memorizing two and four items. From the electrophysiological results, individuals with high social anxiety could maintain more information in VWM. However, maybe anxiety consumes the available cognitive resources to compensate for the supposed to be impaired effective performance, so that individuals with high social anxiety perform the same as individuals with low social anxiety in terms of behavioral outcomes.

Keywords: CDA; attentional control; event-related potentials; social anxiety; visual working memory.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Illustration of the time course of a trial in this experiment (e.g., left hemifield, two memory items, change).
Figure 2
Figure 2
The grand averaged waveforms of contralateral delay activity (CDA) of high (HSA) and low socially anxious (LSA) groups. The left was for two memory items. The right was for four memory items. The gray-shaded area was the rendering phase of memory array or test array.
Figure 3
Figure 3
The mean amplitude of CDA in high (HSA) and LSA groups under different numbers of memory item conditions (the vertical bars extend and below the mean by one stand error).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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