Australian Journal of Psychology

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An examination of the relationship between

anxiety and performance on prospective and
retrospective memory tasks

Lynne M. Harris & Steven R. Cumming

To cite this article: Lynne M. Harris & Steven R. Cumming (2003) An examination of the
relationship between anxiety and performance on prospective and retrospective memory
tasks, Australian Journal of Psychology, 55:1, 51-55, DOI: 10.1080/00049530412331312874

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 51

An Examination of the Relationship Between Anxiety

and Performance on Prospective
and Retrospective Memory Tasks
Lynne M. Harris and Steven R. Cumming
The University of Sydney, Australia

The present study investigated the association between self-reported state anxiety, trait anxiety and perfor-
mance on closely matched prospective and retrospective memory tasks and on a working memory (reading
span) task. Eysenck and Calvo's (1992) processing efficiency theory suggests that the deleterious effects
of anxiety on cognitive task performance are mediated by worry occupying working memory. They suggest
that the adverse effects of anxiety would be most marked when people are experiencing acute anxiety states
on tasks that place high demands on working memory capacity and are treated as secondary tasks, condi-
tions that typically occur for prospective remembering. Sixty-three undergraduate students were allocated
to high, medium and low anxiety conditions using tertile splits of ranked state and trait anxiety scores.
It was found that people with elevated levels of state anxiety performed more poorly on a prospective
memory test than people with lower levels of state anxiety. No difference between these groups in retrospec-
tive memory or reading span performance was found. Trait anxiety scores were unrelated to performance on
any of the memory tasks. The results suggest that state anxiety has a direct impact on prospective memory
performance that is independent of its impact on working memory capacity.

Prospective memory refers to the ability to remember to do
things in the future, and is usually measured by whether
people remember to perform an action at some later time.
In everyday life, prospective memory tasks include remember-
ing to attend appointments, deliver messages, and take medica-
tion (Dobbs & Rule, 1987). In experimental settings,
an event-based prospective memory test might involve remem-
bering to press a key in response to the word "rake" if it
appears during a short-term memory test (e.g., Einstein
& McDaniel, 1990). In contrast, most long-term memory tasks
are retrospective and are concerned with remembering past
experiences, such as what you had for lunch yesterday and
who you were with or, in more experimental situations, the
contents of a word list presented minutes or hours before
(Winograd, 1988).
Tests of prospective memory include both a prospective
component ("remembering to remember"; Dobbs & Rule,
1987) and a retrospective component (remembering the content
of what is to be remembered; Einstein & McDaniel, 1990).
In practice, prospective memory tests de-emphasise the amount
of information that needs to be remembered and emphasise
the need for the individual to spontaneously remember to per-
form the action (e.g., Cherry & LeCompte, 1999; Einstein
& McDaniel, 1990), while retrospective memory tests empha-
sise remembering content. For example, Mantyla (1993) used
a prospective memory procedure requiring responses to 16 nouns
and a retrospective procedure requiring remembering of 120
nouns. Similarly, Einstein & McDaniel (1990) examined
prospective memory by looking at responses to three occurrences
of the word "rake" in a 42-item list, compared to retrospective
free recall of 36 words and retrospective recognition of 56 words.
Retrospective remembering and prospective remembering
both require that to-be-remembered information is encoded,
and both require that the information is held and eventually
retrieved. The fundamental difference between prospective and
retrospective memory measures, however, is that prospective
remembering requires that the instruction to activate retrieval,
or the intention to remember, must be retained and retrieved
at the appropriate time (Einstein & McDaniel, 1990). As would
be expected from this description, factors that influence encod-
ing and recall of content that are important for both prospective
and retrospective remembering, such as word frequency
and encoding specificity, have a similar impact on both kinds
of tasks (e.g., Mantyla, 1993; McDaniel & Einstein, 1993).
It may be expected that variables affecting the attentional
capacity necessary for ongoing retention and unprompted
periodic retrieval would differentially affect prospective and
retrospective remembering. Certainly, restricted attentional
capacity appears to interfere with the initiation of intentions
to remember, and to adversely affect prospective memory task
performance. For example, Park, Hertzog, Kidder, Morrell,
and Mayhorn (1997) reported that event-based prospective
tasks had particularly high attentional requirements, exerting
a high performance cost on a concurrent working memory task
(see also Einstein, McDaniel, Richardson, Guynn & Cunfer,
1995; Ellis & Nimmo-Smith, 1993; Kidder, Park, Hertzog,
& Morrell, 1997).
Harris and Menzies (1999) reported that elevated state
anxiety also differentially affects prospective and retrospec-
tive memory measures, being associated with reduced pro-
spective memory performance, but not with retrospective
memory performance. This finding can be understood in terms
of Eysenck and Calvo's (1992) processing efficiency theory.
These authors distinguish between the impact of trait anxiety,
a characteristic that implies a disposition towards high levels
of psychophysiological arousal, and state anxiety, which
refers to the actual anxiety experienced at a particular time
determined by both trait anxiety and situational threat.
This theory recognises that anxiety may either enhance
or adversely affect task performance, and both of these effects
are explained by resource allocation. Eysenck and Calvo
(1992) argue that anxiety will enhance performance on tasks
treated as primary because fear of adverse outcomes will lead
an individual to preferentially allocate resources to ensure

Address for correspondence: Dr Lynne Harris, School of Behavioural and Community Health Sciences, Faculty of Health Science,
The University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. Email: L.Harris@fhs.usyd.edu.au

- Australian Journal of Psychology Vol. 55, No. I, 2003 pp. 51-55

52 Lynne M.Harris and Steven R.Cumming
success on that task. However, anxiety may interfere with cap-
acity demanding cognitive tasks because distracting thoughts
(worry) associated with state anxiety compete for limited
resources. In support of this view, Sorg and Whitney (1992)
examined performance on a working memory task among high
trait anxious compared to low trait anxious individuals either
under conditions of situational stress likely to induce anxiety
states or no stress. In the absence of stress, high trait anxious
individuals performed better than low, but in the presence
of stressors this effect was reversed. Eysenck and Calvo
suggest that the deleterious effects of state anxiety on cogni-
tive task performance would be most marked on tasks that
place high demands on working memory capacity and are
treated as secondary tasks. Park et al. (1997) reported that
event-based prospective tasks were particularly sensitive
to concurrent working memory load, attributing this to the
demands on working memory resources that must be diverted
to allow sustained and continuous monitoring to ensure that
responding occurs appropriately. In addition, prospective
memory tasks are always carried out in the context of other
ongoing activity, usually under conditions in which the relative
number of responses required suggests that the prospective
task is likely to be treated as secondary (e.g., McDaniel
& Einstein, 1990; Mantyla, 1993, 1994). It may therefore
be expected that prospective memory tasks may be particularly
sensitive to the effects of state anxiety.
A number of features of Harris and Menzies' (1999)
methodology should be noted. Firstly, the prospective and
retrospective tasks were quite different in a range of ways
apart from the relationship between the time at which the
instruction to remember was provided and that at which the
opportunity to retrieve was available. The memory tasks varied
greatly in the amount of information that needed to be remem-
bered (four exemplars of two semantic categories had to
be identified in the prospective task and 60 items were avail-
able for recollection in the retrospective free recall task).
The tasks also differed in the cues that were available for
remembering (exemplars of the semantic category in the
prospective task and no cues in the retrospective free recall
task). In addition, the amount of time between the encoding
of the material and the retrieval of the material varied between
the two tasks. The opportunity to remember on the prospective
task occurred about 10 minutes after the information to be
remembered was presented, but there was no delay between
encoding and retrieval in the retrospective task. The tasks also
differed in the amount of competing activity expected at the
time of retrieval. The prospective task was carried out in the
background of a semantic generation task, while the retrospec-
tive task was carried out alone. It should be emphasised that
such differences between prospective and retrospective
memory measures are common in the literature. However, the
many differences between the prospective and retrospective
memory tasks make it difficult to clearly determine why
anxiety is associated with prospective remembering only.
Cumming and Harris (2001) examined the predictions
of Eysenck and Calvo's processing efficiency theory in tasks
analogous to diagnostic decision-making. Cumming and Harris
compared task performance among groups of people with and
without experimentally-induced anxiety (Study I) and with
and without naturally-occurring elevated state anxiety (Study
2). In both studies performance on the primary decision-
making task was disrupted by anxiety and the findings could
not be explained by competition for limited working memory
resources. Rather, it appeared that the effects of anxiety on per-
formance were more direct, disengaging attention from an
ongoing cognitive activity. These authors argued that a direct
impact of anxiety on attention was an adaptive biological
Australian Journal of Psychology - April 2003
imperative designed to allow the organism to attend to and
respond to potential threats. Several other research findings
have suggested that anxiety is associated with reduced focused
attention and increased peripheral scanning (e.g., Fox, 1993:
Shapiro & Lim, 1989), and Hopko, Ashcraft, Ruggiero,
and Lewis (1998) argue that it is the failure to inhibit attention
to task-irrelevant distractors that accounts for performance
decrements among anxious individuals.
The present study sought to examine the relationship
between state and trait anxiety, prospective remembering and
retrospective remembering using memory tasks that were
matched as closely as possible. In particular, the amount of to-
be-remembered information, the nature of the cues available
for remembering, and the time between encoding and retrieval.
were matched between the prospective and retrospective tasks.
The prospective and retrospective tests were both embedded
within a semantic association task. This is in contrast to previ-
ous studies comparing prospective and retrospective remem-
bering where prospective memory tests are carried out in the
presence of other ongoing cognitive tasks, such as short-term
memory tests (Cherry & Le Compte, 1999) or semantic associ-
ation tasks (Mantyla, 1993) but retrospective remembering
is carried out in the absence of other competing tasks.
The relationship between working memory capacity, state
anxiety and prospective remembering was also considered
directly in the present study. It was predicted that performance
on the prospective memory measure, but not the retrospective
memory measure, would be worse among those with elevated
state anxiety compared to those with low levels of state
anxiety. If this effect was mediated by working memory
capacity, it was expected that there would be a correlation
between performance on a measure of working memory, the
reading span task, and prospective memory performance.
Based on Eysenck and Calvo's (1992) formulation of the
relationship between anxiety and cognitive task performance
it was expected that differences in trait anxiety would not
adversely influence performance on the memory tasks.
METHOD
Participants
From an original pool of 100 undergraduates who completed the
tasks, 63 had perfect immediate retrieval of the to-be-remem-
bered word list. This group formed the sample for the present
study. The rationale for this selection of participants is described
in detail below. The mean age of participants was 19.4 years
(range 18-35 years) and 83% of the sample was female.
Materials
Two matched lists of 35 words were constructed. All of the
words were nouns between five and seven letters in length
with an average Kucera-Francis word frequency of 39.3 (range
30-50) list 1, and 38.7 (range 30-50) list 2 (MRC Psycholin-
guistic database: Coltheart, 1981 ). A total of five targets were
embedded within each 35 word list. The two sets of five
targets were matched for word frequency (means were 42.8,
range = 36-50, for list 1 and 43.2, range = 38-50, for list 2).
Each list was later used in either the prospective or retrospec-
tive memory procedure (counterbalanced between partici-
pants), so that the maximum score for the prospective and
retrospective memory tests was 5. The reading span task
required participants to listen to short sentences read aloud in
groups of two, three, four or five sentences. After each
sentence was read, a judgement had to be made as to whether
the sentence was true or false (e.g., "You sit on a chair") and
the final word in the sentence had to be retained (e.g.,"chair").
After all sentences in the group were read aloud participants
wrote down the final words from all sentences in the group.

Participants were provided with a set of materials comprising
the following:
1. A sheet of paper containing 20 words, half of which were
the 10 targets. This was used as an encoding check.
2. A sheet of paper to record responses to the reading span task.
3.The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI; Spielberger,
Gorsuch, & Lushene, 1983), a commonly used measure
of state and trait anxiety.
4. A sheet of paper for recording responses to the semantic
association task / prospective memory task with the numbers
1-35 in three columns.
5. A sheet of paper for recording responses to the semantic
association task / retrospective memory task with the numbers
1-35 in three columns and the instructions with the numbers
36-70 in three columns.
Procedure
Participants were tested in groups of approximately 15.
All participants received the following instructions:
This task must be done quietly and by yourself. Concentrate on these
instructions. Ask anything you want to now, because only some
of the instructions will be repeated later.
You need to remember a short list of words and your memory for
the words will be tested. You will do some filler tasks to create a
delay for the memory tests. You will hear a list of words and will be
asked to write down a word that is related to the one that you hear in
meaning. If you hear "zoo", you might write "lion". While you are
doing this, you may hear words from the list that you learn. If you
hear a word that is from the list, write the word itself, rather than an
associate. If you hear "dog", and "dog" was on the list, write "dog"
rather than, for example, "cat" on the associate task. This instruction
won't be repeated.
Participants were then presented with the 10-word study list
at a rate of one word every 10 seconds. Following this they
performed the encoding check. Only those who scored 100%
on this task were included in the data analysis to ensure that
any later prospective memory failures could not be attributed to
a failure to encode the content. Participants were asked to circle
the 10 study list items from a list of 20 words. All participants
then completed the reading span task and completed the STAI.
Lastly, participants performed the two memory tests embed-
ded in the semantic association test. For the semantic associa-
tion test, the 70 words were read out at a rate of one every
10 seconds and participants wrote a semantic associate of each
word during the interval while keeping a running total of all
words that began with the letter "s".2 Of the 70 words, 10 were
from the study list, and memory for these words was indicated
when participants recorded the word itself, rather than an
associate, in response to study list words. During the first half
of the semantic association task participants were not re-
minded of the instruction to write down the study list word
instead of an associate. The responses to the five study list
words presented during this part of the test therefore reflected
prospective memory, as participants had to retain the intention
to respond to study list words across time. During the second
half of the semantic association task the instruction to write
down the study list word instead of an associate was repeated,
so that responses to the five studied words presented in this
phase indicated retrospective memory. The memory tests were
always carried out in the same order, with the prospective
memory test first. The delay between the presentation of the
study list and the semantic association task was about
10 minutes, and the whole procedure took about 30 minutes.
RESULTS
The average proportion correct on the retrospective memory
task was significantly better than the average proportion
Australian Journal of Psychology - April 2003
Anxiety and Memory 53
correct on the prospective memory task t(62) = 5.8, p < 0.05;
means were 0.56 (SD = 0.48) and 0.91 (SD = 0.17)
for prospective and retrospective memory respectively). 3
There was a significant correlation between State and Trait
anxiety scores (r = 0.52, p < 0.01 one-tailed). However, no
correlation emerged between scores on the prospective and
retrospective memory test (r = 0.13, p > 0.1) or between the
reading span task and either the prospective or retrospective
memory tasks (r = 0.12 and r = 0.12, p > 0.1 for prospective
and retrospective memory respectively). 4
State Anxiety and Memory
The relationship between anxiety and the memory measures
was examined using analysis of variance. Participants were
divided into three approximately equal groups using a tertile
split on the ranked state anxiety scores. This methodology
is commonly used in examining the relationship between
cognitive task performance and anxiety (e.g., see Elliman,
Green, Rogers, & Finch, 1997; Hopko et al., 1998). The low
anxiety group comprised people with state anxiety scores
between 20 and 36. The moderate anxiety group comprised
people with state anxiety scores between 37 and 45. The high
anxiety group comprised people with state anxiety scores
between 46 and 60. One way analysis of variance with planned
contrasts comparing the three groups revealed that the high
anxiety group performed significantly worse than the
low anxiety group on the prospective memory task F(1, 60)
= 5.65, p s 0.02. No other differences between groups were
significant, although the difference between the low
and moderate groups approached significance F(1, 60) = 3.34,
p = 0.07. There were no significant differences between the
groups on retrospective memory performance or reading span
performance (see Table 1).
Trait Anxiety and Memory
The analyses described above were repeated with participants
divided into three approximately equal groups using a tertile
split on the ranked trait anxiety scores. The low anxiety group
comprised people with trait anxiety scores between 24 and 37.
The moderate anxiety group comprised people with trait
anxiety scores between 38 and 43. The high anxiety group
comprised people with trait anxiety scores between 44 and 57.
There were no significant differences between the groups
on prospective memory, retrospective memory or reading span
measures (see Table 1).
DISCUSSION
The findings of this study demonstrated that elevated state
anxiety was associated with poorer performance on a prospec-
Table I
Mean Prospective, Retrospective and Reading Span Task
Performance for Those with Low, Medium, and High State
and Trait Anxiety Scores
Task
Prospective Retrospective Reading Span
Memory (SD) Memory (SD) (SD)
State Anxiety Level
Low (N = 22) 0.75 (0.42) 0.93 (0.11) 4.57 (0.64)
Medium (N = 22) 0.50 (0.50) 0.92 (0.22) 4.18 (0.88)
High (N = 19) 0.41 (0.46) 0.89 (0.17) 4.11 (0.92)
Trait Anxiety Level
Low (N = 20) 0.66 (0.45) 0.91 (0.24) 4.50 (0.71)
Medium (N = 22) 0.50 (0.51) 0.90 (0.16) 4.11 (0.90)
High (N = 21) 0.53 (0.47) 0.93 (0.09) 4.29 (0.83)
54 Lynne M.
Harris and Steven R. Cumming
tive memory task, but was not associated with performance
on a retrospective memory measure. Trait anxiety, however,
was not related to either prospective or retrospective memory
task performance. The findings confirm and extend those of
Harris and Menzies (1999) concerning the relationship
between state anxiety and prospective, but not retrospective,
memory task performance. While replicating those findings,
this study is the first to systematically equate the prospective
and retrospective tasks in terms of the amount of to-be-remem-
bered information, the delay between study and test and the
presence of a competing background task.
Dissociations between prospective and retrospective
memory are uncommon in the memory literature (e.g., Einstein
et al., 1995; Einstein, Smith, McDaniel, & Shaw, 1997;
Mantyla, 1993; McDaniel & Einstein, 1993), and this is not
surprising as performance on prospective memory tests usually
reflects both a retrospective memory component (remembering
the content of the prospective memory task) and a prospective
memory component (remembering the intention to remember).
In the present task, the use of the encoding check and the
decision to select only participants who demonstrated accurate
retrospective memory reduced the influence of retrospective
memory failure on prospective memory performance. Consis-
tent with this argument, there was no correlation between the
prospective and retrospective memory performance.
One account of the relationship between anxiety and prospec-
tive memory is in terms of processing efficiency theory (Eysenck
& Calvo, 1992). If state anxiety adversely influences the avail-
ability of cognitive resources, and if the self-initiated retrieval
of instructions to remember imposes a cognitive "cost" upon
prospective memory that is not borne by retrospective memory.
it would follow that anxiety would impact upon prospective,
but not retrospective memory, as found in the present study.
From processing efficiency theory an effect of state, but not trait.
anxiety on task performance would be expected, as reported
in this study. However, processing efficiency theory would also
predict a relationship between anxiety and reading span perfor-
mance, as has been reported in a number of previous studies
(e.g., Sorg & Whitney, 1992). Markham and Darke (1991) found
significant differences between high and low anxiety groups only
on difficult items from a verbal reasoning task. In the present
study, participants performed well on the reading span task,
suggesting that it was not a difficult task, and so the absence
of differences between the state anxiety groups in the reading
span data is not surprising.
Alternatively, Cumming and Harris (2001) propose that state
anxiety impacts upon cognitive task performance directly,
without being a consequence of working memory disruption.
The present results are consistent with this suggestion. Anxiety
was found to adversely affect prospective memory, but had
no significant effect on reading span performance, and there
was no relationship between reading span and prospective
memory performance. It would therefore appear that the
impact of anxiety on prospective memory is independent of its
impact on working memory capacity. An adaptive function
of anxiety is to disengage attention from concurrent and
demanding tasks in order to examine the environment for
potential threat. By this account, anxiety does not impair task
performance by competing for working memory resources.
rather it causes a redirection of attention away from current,
ongoing, information processing tasks. Such a view is consistent
with the suggestion of Hopko et al. (1998) that anxiety causes a
difficulty with focusing attention that accounts for poor perfor-
mance on cognitive tasks. Prospective remembering requires
retention and periodical unprompted retrieval of the intention
to recall, and may therefore be more vulnerable to these atten-
tional influences than retrospective memory. Certainly.
Australian Journal of Psychology - April 2003
restricted attentional capacity appears to interfere with the
initiation of intentions to remember, and to adversely affect
prospective memory task performance (Einstein et al., 1995;
Ellis & Nimmo-Smith, 1993; Kidder et al., 1997; Park et al..
1997). A withdrawal of attention from ongoing cognitive tasks
to effectively scan the environment for potential danger may
be seen as extremely adaptive for organisms that are in a state
of acute anxiety. Further studies investigating the relationship
between anxiety, prospective memory and sustained attention
are currently being undertaken.
ENDNOTES
I This list is also available at htttp://www.psy.uwa.edu.au/MRC
DataBase/uwa/mrc.htm
2 This task was included to increase the ongoing working memory load
during the semantic association/memory task to make the overall task
more difficult.
3 To check for possible ceiling effects the analyses of the retrospective
data were repeated removing participants who scored 5 on the retro-
spective test. The pattern of results with this smaller sample was
identical.
4 There was a ceiling effect in the reading span task using the scoring
recommended by Daneman and Carpenter (1980). When the reading
span responses were re-scored to reflect errors at each set level.
the ceiling effect was eliminated. However, there was still no correla-
tion between reading span scores and either prospective memory
or retrospective memory scores.
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