Neutral and threatening distracter word stimuli are unnecessarily stored in working memory but do not differ in their degree of working memory storage

Working Memory Performance for Differentially Conditioned Stimuli

“…Specifically, small loads (i.e., 2 rectangles) resulted in greater accuracy, faster RTs, and lower Pashler's K scores compared to large loads (i.e., 4 rectangles). These findings suggest that the addition of these conditioned stimuli did not prevent the typical expected load effects one would observe in a canonical change detection task from occurring (e.g., Luck and Vogel, 1997;Vogel et al, 2001;Eng et al, 2005;Zhou and Thomas, 2015), and also replicate previous work that used valenced stimuli in these task designs (Sessa et al, 2011;Stout et al, 2013Stout et al, , 2015Ward et al, 2019Ward et al, , 2021. Furthermore, because all condition colors were matched for luminance, our task consisted of simple shapes as used in classical change detection task paradigms (Luck and Vogel, 1997;Vogel et al, 2001;Feuerstahler et al, 2019), and our stimuli were only manipulated based on their valence attribute from previous conditioning (i.e., CS+ and CS-) or novel presentation (i.e., N), we believe our task design to be sound given that no other task parameters were significantly altered.…”

“…RT data was inspected at the individual trial-level. Similar to our previous work (Ward et al, 2019(Ward et al, , 2020(Ward et al, , 2021, we removed trials with RTs below 150 ms and incorrect trials. This was done to remove any trials that may reflect random responding, trials where no response was made, and to directly assess RTs for correct-only trials.…”

“…Although BF 10 values are treated on a continuous scale, with values closer to 0 reflecting stronger evidence for the null hypothesis (Lee and Wagenmakers, 2014;Wagenmakers et al, 2016Wagenmakers et al, , 2018aKeysers et al, 2020;van Doorn et al, 2021), guidelines for communicating discrete BF 10 outcomes have been proposed (see Jeffreys, 1939;Kass and Raftery, 1995;Jarosz and Wiley, 2014), with van Doorn et al ( 2021) suggesting the following interpretations for BF 10 values: 0-0.1, strong evidence for null hypothesis; 0.1-0.33, moderate evidence for null hypothesis; 0.33-1, weak evidence for null hypothesis; 1-3, weak evidence for alternative hypothesis; 3-10, moderate evidence for alternative hypothesis; and > 10, strong evidence for alternative hypothesis. We used this guideline as a formality for communicating our confidence in arriving at a null outcome, as was done in our previous work (Ward et al, 2019(Ward et al, , 2020(Ward et al, , 2021. For outcomes with strong support for the alternative hypothesis held, we further examined these effects through follow-up comparisons to determine whether such effects were present.…”

Effect of test anxiety on visual working memory capacity using evidence from event‐related potentials

“…Second, regarding the experimental stimuli, we used neutral color squares to explore the general working memory capacity characteristics of HTA individuals. Threatening stimuli can be employed in future work to further explore HTA individuals' working memory (Berggren & Eimer, 2021;Stout et al, 2013;Ward et al, 2021). Third, the relationship between test anxiety and working memory capacity remains unclear.…”