Individuals with anxiety have attentional biases toward threat-related distractors. This deficit in attentional control has been shown to impact visual working memory (VWM) filtering efficiency, as anxious individuals inappropriately store threatening distractors in VWM. It remains unclear, however, whether this mis-allocation of memory resources is due to inappropriate attentional enhancement of threatening distractors, or to a failure in suppression. Here, we used a systematically lateralized VWM task with fearful and neutral faces to examine event-related potentials related to attentional selection (N2pc), suppression (P_D), and working memory maintenance (CDA). We found that state anxiety correlated with attentional enhancement of threat-related distractors, such that more anxious individuals had larger N2pc amplitudes toward fearful distractors than neutral distractors. However, there was no correlation between anxiety and memory storage of fearful distractors (CDA). These findings demonstrate that anxiety biases attention toward fearful distractors, but that this bias does not always guarantee increased memory storage of threat-related distractors.

有焦虑症的人对与威胁相关的干扰物有注意力偏见。这种注意力控制的缺陷已被证明会影响视觉工作记忆 (VWM) 过滤效率，因为焦虑的个体不恰当地将威胁性的干扰因素存储在 VWM 中。然而，目前尚不清楚这种记忆资源的错误分配是由于对威胁性干扰物的注意力不适当增强，还是由于抑制失败。在这里，我们使用带有恐惧和中性面孔的系统侧化 VWM 任务来检查与注意选择 (N2pc)、抑制 (P _D) 和工作记忆维护 (CDA)。我们发现状态焦虑与威胁相关干扰物的注意力增强相关，因此与中性干扰物相比，焦虑程度更高的个体对恐惧干扰物的 N2pc 幅度更大。然而，焦虑与恐惧干扰物（CDA）的记忆存储之间没有相关性。这些发现表明，焦虑使注意力偏向于可怕的干扰因素，但这种偏见并不总能保证增加与威胁相关的干扰因素的记忆存储。