It happens to many people that when facing a memory or attention test, they perform below what would be expected for their age.
This, which happens to children and adults, has tried to be explained by studying the influence of different factors. One very popular has been anxiety , as it is considered a variable that can interfere with the material that we have to process in our brain at the time of the test.
Matthew Owens and other UK researchers launched an experiment to find out a little more about how anxiety could affect performance on a math task and non-verbal intelligence test.
The results of their study, published in The British Journal of Psychology (2012), showed how high anxiety is not always detrimental when taking a test, but there are other variables that come into play. This is the case of working memory.
This type of memory allows us to maintain and manipulate information ‘online’ until we respond to a given problem. It seems that the relationship between anxiety and working memory is relevant in explaining poor performance on these math and reasoning tests.
In the experiment, 96 adolescents between 12 and 14 years old participated in whom their level of trait anxiety (the tendency to show an anxious response to situations), their working memory capacity (divided into high or low) and the other two cognitive tests.
The authors found that the relationship between high trait anxiety and low working memory capacity predicted outcome on intelligence and math tests.
This means that if we are people with an anxious tendency (we perceive situations as threatening more frequently) and we have a low working memory capacity, then it is more likely that our performance on the abstract reasoning and mathematics tests will be negatively affected. .
This relationship, on the contrary, was not observed in those participants with levels of trait anxiety within the mean.
On a practical level, this study could provide us with at least two alternatives to try to improve our performance in the tests: on the one hand, it controls your anxiety, and on the other it trains your working memory.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
