Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Executive functioning relies on the coordinated interaction of attention, working memory (WM) and cognitive control and is particularly vulnerable to anxiety-related disruption. Despite extensive research, few studies have simultaneously examined behavioral performance, visual attention, and physiological arousal across systematically varying cognitive demands and anxiety severity. Using a multimodal approach, we assessed WM performance, eye-movement indices, and electrodermal activity (EDA) in 83 participants, including healthy individuals with low or high trait anxiety and individuals with clinically diagnosed generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Participants completed a dual n-back task, a baseline visual task, and executive tasks with graded complexity. The results indicated that the GAD participants showed reduced WM performance, delayed attentional engagement, altered oculomotor dynamics, and elevated autonomic arousal during continuous WM update. Anxiety severity interacted with task complexity for performance time and EDA amplitude, whereas eye-movement measures were less sensitive to increasing executive load. Together, these findings support Attentional Control Theory and Processing Efficiency Theory, highlighting anxiety-related inefficiencies under executive demand and identifying performance timing and autonomic arousal as sensitive markers of executive dysfunction in anxiety, with implications for cognitive assessment and intervention design.