Levels of Processing, Incidental Memory, and Speech Under Anticipatory Stress

We set out to find whether anticipatory stress ties together two things that are usually studied apart: the depth at which people process information (along with what they happen to remember by accident), and how they speak. To test this, we worked with one hundred university students. Each of them completed a levels-of-processing task and a serial subtraction-by-seven task, and each did so twice, under two very different circumstances. The first was calm. The second came in the minutes just before they sat an academic exam.

The visual task took the longest to process. That same task, when students were later asked unexpectedly to recall words, produced the smallest number of remembered items. Semantic processing, by contrast, left a stronger memory trace, and it did so whether the students were relaxed or facing the exam. So the familiar finding held across both conditions.

What shifted most under stress was false recognition. The size of that shift suggests that the subtler machinery of information processing is tied to how a person's body and mind react to the prospect of a stressful event. Anxiety reshaped speech too. As it rose, utterances grew shorter and the pauses between them stretched out, as if more room were needed for mental planning.

Taken together, the total length of pauses and spoken stretches for the correct answers held fairly steady; that measure did not move in any meaningful way. The proportion did move. The balance between time spent speaking and time spent silent changed significantly once the exam loomed.

Canonical correlation analysis pulled out statistically reliable links. It confirmed a relationship between the three levels-of-processing measures and speech in the exam condition. It also tied the levels-of-processing and incidental memory changes to the changes we saw in speech. The reading we draw from this is that exam stress drives arousal, and that arousal pushes cognitive functioning in different directions depending on the task at hand.