Anxiety Eats Into Attention When Working Memory Runs Low, Eye-Tracking Study Finds

Anxiety and working memory have long been studied as separate forces shaping how well people think under pressure, but a new study suggests the real story lies in how the two interact as mental demands climb. Researchers at the Rekhi Centre of Excellence for the Science of Happiness at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur report that working memory capacity emerges as the primary determinant of task performance, while anxiety leaves its fingerprints mainly on the eyes and the body, with those traces most visible in people whose working memory is comparatively weak.

The study, published open access in Discover Psychology, was led by Saurabh Sharma and Rajlakshmi Guha. The team recruited 96 healthy young adults and sorted them into four profiles based on their trait anxiety and working memory capacity: low anxiety with high working memory, low anxiety with low working memory, high anxiety with high working memory, and high anxiety with low working memory. Anxiety was assessed with the State–Trait Anxiety Inventory, one of the most widely used self-report instruments in psychology, and working memory capacity was measured with an n-back paradigm, a demanding task in which participants must continuously update and compare information held in mind.

What sets the study apart is its multimodal measurement strategy. While participants worked through a progressively harder battery of visual and executive tasks, including Baseline Visual, Dual n-Back, Arithmetic Visual, and Stroop Visual Search tasks, the researchers recorded eye movements and electrodermal activity continuously. Eye tracking captures the moment-to-moment choreography of attention: where a person looks, how long their gaze lingers on a fixation point, and how quickly their eyes orient toward new, task-relevant information. Electrodermal activity, measured as tiny fluctuations in the skin’s ability to conduct electricity, serves as a real-time window into autonomic arousal, the physiological undercurrent of stress and effort.

The central finding is a clear division of labor between the two individual-difference factors. Working memory capacity, the ability to hold and manipulate information in mind over seconds, emerged as the primary driver of how well people actually performed the tasks. Anxiety, by contrast, was linked to differences in oculomotor behavior and autonomic responses, and those differences were most pronounced in the low-working-memory groups. In other words, anxiety did not simply degrade performance across the board; its costs surfaced in the fine-grained mechanics of attention and in the body’s arousal system, and they hit hardest when the mental workspace was already limited.

Participants with high working memory capacity maintained efficient attentional sampling and comparatively stable physiological arousal even as cognitive demands escalated. The researchers interpret this pattern as consistent with effective top-down regulatory control, the capacity of goal-directed processes to keep attention locked on task goals and to buffer the system against distraction and worry. Efficient sampling of the visual scene means extracting more information per unit of cognitive effort, and stable arousal suggests that these individuals were not paying a growing physiological tax as tasks became harder.

The picture was starkly different for the low-working-memory groups, and especially for participants who combined low working memory with high anxiety. These individuals showed prolonged fixation durations, meaning their gaze dwelled longer on individual points, a sign of sluggish or effortful processing. They also showed delayed visual orienting, taking longer to shift their eyes toward relevant information as the task landscape changed, and elevated electrodermal responses, indicating heightened physiological arousal during the tasks. Together, these markers sketch a system working harder to accomplish less, with attentional deployment and bodily arousal both drifting away from the efficient pattern seen in the high-capacity groups.

Because the study used a categorical, four-group comparative design throughout, the authors are careful about how far they push the interpretation. They read the overall pattern as broadly consistent with an account in which higher working memory capacity is associated with attenuated anxiety-related costs at the level of moment-to-moment attentional deployment, while being explicit about what the design can and cannot establish directly. Group comparisons of this kind reveal how the profiles differ, but they do not by themselves pin down the causal chain connecting anxiety, working memory, and physiological regulation, a caveat the authors state openly in the paper.

The findings carry weight for a long-running theoretical conversation. Working memory capacity and anxiety have each been independently implicated in attentional control, the umbrella term for the processes that keep cognition aligned with goals in the face of distraction. But how the two relate to one another in shaping moment-to-moment cognitive and physiological processing under increasing demand has remained poorly understood. By tracking both eye movements and electrodermal activity continuously across tasks of escalating complexity, the study offers a way to watch that interaction unfold in real time rather than inferring it from final scores alone.

One practical implication is that physiological and eye-based markers could serve as candidate indicators of individual differences in attentional regulation, a point the authors emphasize in their discussion. Fixation duration, orienting speed, and electrodermal responsiveness are measurable without asking participants to introspect or report anything, which makes them attractive for studying populations where self-report is unreliable, from very young children to clinical groups. If such markers prove robust across contexts, they could help identify who is likely to struggle under high cognitive load before performance actually collapses.

The study also frames a familiar experience in new terms. Anyone who has felt their mind tighten during a difficult exam or a high-stakes mental calculation knows that worry and workload seem to feed each other. This research suggests a mechanism for that loop: when working memory resources are plentiful, they appear to absorb or offset the physiological and attentional costs that anxiety imposes, but when resources are scarce, those costs spill over into visible markers of strained attention and heightened arousal. As demands escalate, the difference between the profiles widens, hinting that stress-heavy environments may be where individual differences in cognitive resources matter most. The work was approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee of the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, with informed consent from all participants, and it appears at a moment when interest in connecting moment-by-moment physiological signals to real cognitive outcomes is accelerating across psychology and neuroscience.

Subject of Research: Interaction of working memory capacity and anxiety in attentional control and physiological arousal under increasing task complexity

Article Title: Working memory anxiety and cognitive efficiency under task complexity using eye tracking and physiological arousal

Article References: Sharma, S., & Guha, R. (2026). Working memory anxiety and cognitive efficiency under task complexity using eye tracking and physiological arousal. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00941-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00941-y

Keywords: working memory, anxiety, attentional control, eye tracking, electrodermal activity, cognitive efficiency, task complexity, n-back, Stroop task, arousal, cognitive demand, Discover Psychology