Objective: A computational cognitive architecture for simulating the effect of trait anxiety on working memory.
Method: The research used Big Five theory of personality as its psychological basis. It simulated the effect of trait anxiety on working memory. The study proposes a model of personality based on fuzzy theory and the effect of trait anxiety on retrieval threshold is modeled based on up-to-date psychological references and comments of experts. The extended personality model is embedded in ACT-R cognitive architecture to make it capable of making decisions and processing information based on personality factor.
Results: The model is able of simulating human behavior at an acceptable level with respect to being compared with experimental data and psychological papers.
Conclusion: Anxiety is one of the most important personality traits that affect human behavior, specially working memory. Accordingly, embedding this factor in computational cognitive models can improve their precision.