Out of fright, out of mind: impaired memory for information negated during looming threat

People often need to update representations of information upon discovering them to be incorrect, a process that can be interrupted by competing cognitive demands. Because anxiety and stress can impair cognitive performance, we tested whether looming threat can similarly interfere with the process of updating representations of a statement’s truthfulness. On each trial, participants saw a face paired with a personality descriptor. Each pairing was followed by a signal indicating whether the pairing was “true”, or “false” (a negation of the truth of the statement), and this signal could be followed by a warning of imminent electric shock (i.e., the looming threat). As predicted, threat of shock left memory for “true” pairings intact, while impairing people’s ability to label negated pairings as untrue. Contrary to our predictions, the pattern of errors for pairings that were negated under threat suggested that these mistakes were at least partly attributable to participants forgetting that they saw the negated information at all (rather than being driven by miscategorization of the pairings as true). Consistent with this, linear ballistic accumulator modelling suggested that this impaired recognition stemmed from weaker memory traces rather than decisional processes. We suggest that arousal due to looming threat may interfere with executive processes important for resolving competition between mutually suppressive tags of whether representations in memory are “true” or “false”.