Evidence suggests that threatening stimuli induce attentional biases compared to neutral stimuli, leading to subsequent storage in working memory. The current study examined how threatening versus neutral word distracters influence attention, and how this affects the unnecessary storage of these task-irrelevant stimuli in working memory. We measured the N2pc and contralateral delay activity (CDA), two event-related potentials (ERPs) that index attentional selection and the number of items maintained in WM, respectively, as participants completed a lateralized change detection task using word stimuli. Our results replicated work demonstrating a CDA effect for word stimuli, and found that distracter words are unnecessarily stored in working memory. However, we observed non-significant differences in attentional bias and working memory storage between distracter word conditions, and individual variation in anxiety was not associated with these processes. Bayes Factor analyses supported these null effects, suggesting that differences between neutral and threatening distracter words are unlikely.

有证据表明，与中性刺激相比，威胁性刺激会引起注意偏差，从而导致随后存储在工作记忆中。当前的研究检查了威胁性词与中性词分心词如何影响注意力，以及这如何影响工作记忆中这些与任务无关的刺激的不必要存储。我们测量了 N2pc 和对侧延迟活动 (CDA)、两个事件相关电位 (ERP)，分别指示注意力选择和 WM 中维护的项目数量，因为参与者使用单词刺激完成了侧化变化检测任务。我们的结果重复了证明词刺激的 CDA 效应的工作，并发现分散注意力的词不必要地存储在工作记忆中。然而，我们观察到干扰词条件之间的注意力偏差和工作记忆存储存在非显着差异，并且焦虑的个体差异与这些过程无关。贝叶斯因子分析支持这些零效应，表明中性和威胁性干扰词之间不太可能存在差异。