Abstract
According to the processing-efficiency hypothesis (Eysenck, Derakshan, Santos, & Calvo, 2007), anxious individuals are thought to require greater activation of brain systems supporting cognitive control (e.g., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; DLPFC) in order to maintain equivalent performance to nonanxious subjects. A recent theory of cognitive control (Braver, Gray, & Burgess, 2007) has proposed that reduced cognitive efficiency might occur as a result of changes in the temporal dynamics of DLPFC recruitment. In this study, we used a mixed blocked/ event-related fMRI design to track transient and sustained activity in DLPFC while high- and low-anxious participants performed a working memory task. The task was performed after the participants viewed videos designed to induce neutral or anxiety-related moods. After the neutral video, the high-anxious participants had reduced sustained but increased transient activation in working memory areas, in comparison with low-anxious participants. The high-anxious group also showed extensive reductions in sustained activation of “default-network” areas (possible deactivation). After the negative video, the low-anxiety group shifted their activation dynamics in cognitive control regions to resemble those of the high-anxious group. These results suggest that reduced cognitive control in anxiety might be due to a transient, rather than sustained, pattern of working memory recruitment. Supplementary information for this study may be found at www.psychonomic.org/archive.
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This work was supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (R01 MH66088 to J.R.G. and T.S.B., R01 MH-66078 to T.S.B., and R01 MH-66031 to D.M.B.)
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Fales, C.L., Barch, D.M., Burgess, G.C. et al. Anxiety and cognitive efficiency: Differential modulation of transient and sustained neural activity during a working memory task. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 8, 239–253 (2008). https://doi.org/10.3758/CABN.8.3.239
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/CABN.8.3.239