In this context, it is first necessary to understand what anxiety and cognitive load are.

What is anxiety?

According to Spielberger, 1983, Anxiety is a state of heightened arousal and tension, often characterized by feelings of worry, apprehension, or fear, typically in response to perceived threats or uncertain outcomes (Spielberger, 1983). Anxiety can manifest as both a temporary emotional state (state anxiety) or a more enduring personality trait (trait anxiety), influencing how individuals perceive and respond to stressors in their environment.

What is cognitive load?

According to Sweller, 1988, Cognitive load is the total amount of mental effort required to process and manage information in working memory during a task. Cognitive load can be influenced by the task's complexity, the individual's prior knowledge, and the way information is presented, with high cognitive load potentially overwhelming cognitive resources and impairing learning and performance.

How does anxiety influence susceptibility to learned inattention during complex tasks?

Anxiety has for a long time been associated with increased levels of arousal. The arousals may make individual to concentrate or focus more on perceived immediate threats thereby losing attention on some important things resulting into selective attention. The individual may therefore spend a lot of time focusing on less important or irrelevant things at the expense of valuable things.

According to Mogg & Bradley, 1998, Anxiety may cause an individual to avoid engaging deeply with challenging tasks which can in return reinforce inattention to those aspects over time. The avoidance behavior is often driven by a desire to reduce discomfort or perceived threat, which can result in long-term deficits in performance and learning.

Finally, Eysenck et al., 2007, opines that, High levels of anxiety can drain cognitive resources, reducing the capacity available for effectively processing task-related information. As a result, individuals may become more likely to overlook important details or disregard previously relevant cues when these no longer appear immediately useful.

How does cognitive load influence susceptibility to learned inattention during complex tasks?

When cognitive load is high, the mental effort required to process information can strain working memory, making it more difficult for individuals to manage and focus on multiple task-relevant elements simultaneously. This limitation can lead to a greater reliance on filtering out certain stimuli to reduce processing demands, thereby increasing susceptibility to learned inattention (Sweller, 1988).

Additionally, under significant cognitive load, individuals often default to automated responses or habitual behaviors, which may involve neglecting stimuli that were previously deemed irrelevant or unnecessary for task success. These habitual patterns can further reinforce inattentive behaviors (Chandler & Sweller, 1991).

Moreover, high cognitive load impairs the ability to detect and correct errors, leading to the persistence of inattentive actions when mistakes are overlooked or not addressed effectively (Paas et al., 2003).

But memory is stored in chemical messages in the brain and I myself once had a strange incident that helped me to understand that there is information in the brain that can be recalled when our senses are triggered (smell, noise, word, etc.) I learned that this is true when I studied Cognitive Psychology at ODU.EDU and experienced it in real life.

So, one day I was walking out of a theater and all of a sudden, a choregraphed song that I must have sung as a toddler came flooding back. I heard the words play out in my mind and I questions what triggered the neurons in my brain to remember that song. I quickly forgot the song within minutes though. But that is definitely proof that I have information stored in my brain and that information can be remembered if any of the triggers that were in the environment when I learned the song is present at the moment.

So I question why the brain only allows us to remember some things but not others. The brain can only process but so much information at once, so maybe that's why.

I believe that if a person remains in a constant state of anxiety, this will eventually lead to exhaustion related to the effort exerted by the brain, and thus the individual will reach a state of apathy. My regards.