Design demanding cognitive tasks as a candidate route to decreasing anxiety during learning¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

Drawing on the finding that high cognitive load abolished both the accuracy impairment and the anxiety-potentiated startle, the authors suggest that future work on the mechanisms behind these behavioral effects "may provide mechanisms useful for designing cognitive strategies to decrease anxiety." The strategy is to engage learners in sufficiently demanding cognitive activity so that resources are allocated to the task rather than to threat processing. The article frames this as a direction for future work, not a tested intervention.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Tasks demanding enough to consume the cognitive resources that would otherwise process threat
• A way to verify that anxiety is actually reduced (e.g., physiological or self-report measures)

Constraints¶

• The article tested healthy individuals only and did not directly test this as an intervention; it notes the adaptive mechanisms found in the healthy sample might break down in pathological anxiety, with threat impairing performance at all cognitive loads

Target Learners¶

• adolescents (10–17 years)
• adults

Target Learning Goals¶

• reducing state anxiety during cognitively demanding learning tasks

Affordances¶

• Limited Resources Threat Cognition Account

Related Strategies¶

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Patel Nilam, Vytal Katherine, Pavletic Nevia, Stoodley Catherine, Pine Daniel S., Grillon Christian, Ernst Monique. (2016). Interaction of Threat and Verbal Working Memory in Adolescents. Psychophysiology. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.12582