Abstract: Previous studies have found that individuals with internet gaming disorder (IGD) have relatively low cognitive functioning and commonly suffers from poor academic performance. As a key aspect of executive functioning, working memory plays an important role in the academic growth of college students, not only as a foundation for cognitive development, learning, and education, but also as a prerequisite to cope with the complex cognitive challenges of daily life. Several studies have shown that IGD risk negatively affects working memory updating, and this impairment likely contributes to poor academic performance in college students at high risk for IGD. Therefore, based on the social cognition theory, this study aims to explore the influences of IGD risk on college students’ working memory updating, as well as the effects and differences in reward and punishment motivation induced by monetary rewards and losses on working memory updating in high-risk (IGD) and low-risk (non-IGD) college students.
Participants were recruited using posters. Forty-two high-risk and 45 low-risk college students were identified using the Internet (Gaming) Addiction Test. In Experiment 1, participants completed three reward-based N-back tasks with different memory loads to examine differences in working memory updating between high- and low-risk college students in conditions with or without reward motivation. In Experiment 2, a punishment-based N-back task was used to examine differences in working memory updating between high- and low-risk college students in conditions with or without punishment motivation across three different memory loads.
The results of Experiment 1 showed that in the rewarded version of the working memory updating task, high-risk college students had weaker processing, that is, longer reaction times and lower accuracy, than low-risk college students. With reward motivation, high- and low-risk college students’ reaction time increased, accuracy improved, and the degree of processing was enhanced. There was no significant difference in the role of reward motivation in facilitating response time and accuracy in the working memory updating task between high- and low-risk college students. The results of Experiment 2 showed that in the punishment version of the working memory updating task, high-risk college students had weaker processing than low-risk college students. With punishment motivation, the accuracy of high- and low-risk college students increased, and it contributed less to facilitating the working memory updating accuracy of high-risk college students than low-risk college students. After conducting a cross-experimental analysis, it was found that the accuracy of reward motivation in working memory updating was significantly higher than that of punishment motivation among high-risk students, and there was no significant difference in the accuracy of reward and punishment motivation among low-risk students. In conclusion, this study showed that the working memory updating speed and accuracy of high-risk college students are significantly slower and lower than low-risk college students. Rewarding motivation helped improve working memory updating performance in both high- and low-risk college students by increasing accuracy and reducing speed, whereas punishment motivation only improved accuracy and had a weaker facilitating effect for high-risk college students than for low-risk college students.
Overall, the facilitating effect of reward motivation on the accuracy of working memory updating in high-risk students is greater than that of punishment motivation, whereas reward and punishment motivation show the same utility value for accuracy of working memory updating in low-risk college students. This implies that college students at high risk for IGD exhibit certain impairment in working memory updating and reduced sensitivity to punishment in cognitive tasks. Additionally, the mechanism of working memory updating in college students at high risk for IGD provides new insights into their poor academic performance, and offers suggestions for reference to address this issue.

Key words: working memory updating, internet gaming disorder, reward motivation, punishment motivation, college students