Does Overloading Cognitive Resources Mimic the Impact of Anxiety on Temporal Cognition?

Anxiety alters how we perceive the world and can alter aspects of cognitive performance. Prominent theories of anxiety suggest that the effect of anxiety on cognition is due to anxious thoughts “overloading” limited cognitive resources, competing with other processes. If this is so, then a cognitive load manipulation should impact performance of a task in the same way as induced anxiety. Thus, we examined the impact of a load manipulation on a time perception task that we have previously shown to be reliably impacted by anxiety. In contrast with our prediction, across 3 studies we found that time perception was insensitive to our load manipulation. Our results do not therefore support the idea that anxiety impacts temporal cognition by overloading limited cognitive resources, at least as induced by a commonly used load manipulation. Thus, anxiety might affect temporal cognition in a unique way, via an evolutionary-preserved defense survival system, as suggested by animal-inspired theories of anxiety, rather than competing for limited attentional resources.