Anticipatory Threat of Shock Reduces the Number of Items Reported From a Brief Visual Display: Evidence for Capacity Loss Along the Scanning Order

Anticipatory threat of shock reduces the number of correct letters reported from a 400 ms 4×3 visual display in 18–25-year-old adults (3.41 ± 1.09 vs 4.70 ± 1.29).

• Why it matters: It tests whether anxiety affects not only working memory but also the earliest, high-capacity stage of visual storage, and whether any capacity loss is uniform across space.
• What they did: Eighty-eight adults were assigned to threat-of-shock or control (n = 44 each), viewed the letter matrix for 400 ms, and completed an untimed whole report; recall and letter positions were analyzed with Welch’s t test and GEE.
• The result: Threat lowered correct recall (Welch t(83.6) = 5.11, p < .001) without changing intrusions (p = .376), and recall declined more steeply left-to-right, with losses limited to the third and fourth letters of the top row.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.