Impact of multilingualism on cardiac autonomic activity, working memory and trait anxiety: a pilot study
- 1Departamento de Ciencias de la Salud, División de Ciencias Biológicas y de la Salud, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM-L), Lerma de Villada, Mexico
- 2Facultad de Medicina, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México (UAEMéx), Toluca de Lerdo, Mexico
- 3Sección de Bioelectrónica, Departamento de Ingeniería Eléctrica, Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional (Cinvestav Unidad Zacatenco), Mexico City, Mexico
Abstract
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in how multilingualism modifies executive functions. Heart rate variability (HRV), a noninvasive and innocuous indicator of cardiac autonomic function, can also capture individual differences that link cognitive performance with physiological and emotional profiles. This pilot study aimed to analyze the association of multilingualism with cognitive, autonomic, and emotional regulation during working memory (WM) tasks, while also considering trait anxiety (Trait-A). Nineteen young adults were classified as a monolingual group (MON, N = 9) or a multilingual group (MUL, N = 10). Participants completed the State‑Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) and the Neuropsychological Battery of Executive Functions and Frontal Lobes (BANFE‑3). They then performed an N-back task at three difficulty levels while HRV linear and nonlinear indices were computed. MON exhibited high Trait‑A, whereas MUL showed moderate Trait‑A. No significant differences were observed in the BANFE-3 subtests, but MUL achieved greater accuracy at the 2-back level of the N-back task. HRV indices showed a load-dependent decline in both groups; within-group analyses, however, revealed that MON and MUL participants showed different within-group autonomic response patterns to cope with the rising cognitive load. These findings suggest that sustained multilingual experience may be associated with differences in autonomic–cognitive responses and attenuated anxiety-related disruptions, underscoring the value of HRV in characterizing individual variability in physiological and behavioral responses.
Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-026-01392-y.
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BibTeX
@article{cabreraontiveros2026impact,
title = {{Impact of multilingualism on cardiac autonomic activity, working memory and trait anxiety: a pilot study}},
author = {Tonantzin Itzel Cabrera-Ontiveros and Diana Estefanía García-Cárdenas and Claudia Ivette Ledesma-Ramírez and Eric Alonso Abarca-Castro and Ana Karen Talavera-Peña and José Javier Reyes-Lagos},
journal = {Cognitive Processing},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.1007/s10339-026-01392-y},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-026-01392-y},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Impact of multilingualism on cardiac autonomic activity, working memory and trait anxiety: a pilot study
AU - Tonantzin Itzel Cabrera-Ontiveros
AU - Diana Estefanía García-Cárdenas
AU - Claudia Ivette Ledesma-Ramírez
AU - Eric Alonso Abarca-Castro
AU - Ana Karen Talavera-Peña
AU - José Javier Reyes-Lagos
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/01
JO - Cognitive Processing
DO - 10.1007/s10339-026-01392-y
UR - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-026-01392-y
AB - Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in how multilingualism modifies executive functions. Heart rate variability (HRV), a noninvasive and innocuous indicator of cardiac autonomic function, can also capture individual differences that link cognitive performance with physiological and emotional profiles. This pilot study aimed to analyze the association of multilingualism with cognitive, autonomic, and emotional regulation during working memory (WM) tasks, while also considering trait anxiety (Trait-A). Nineteen young adults were classified as a monolingual group (MON, N = 9) or a multilingual group (MUL, N = 10). Participants completed the State‑Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) and the Neuropsychological Battery of Executive Functions and Frontal Lobes (BANFE‑3). They then performed an N-back task at three difficulty levels while HRV linear and nonlinear indices were computed. MON exhibited high Trait‑A, whereas MUL showed moderate Trait‑A. No significant differences were observed in the BANFE-3 subtests, but MUL achieved greater accuracy at the 2-back level of the N-back task. HRV indices showed a load-dependent decline in both groups; within-group analyses, however, revealed that MON and MUL participants showed different within-group autonomic response patterns to cope with the rising cognitive load. These findings suggest that sustained multilingual experience may be associated with differences in autonomic–cognitive responses and attenuated anxiety-related disruptions, underscoring the value of HRV in characterizing individual variability in physiological and behavioral responses. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-026-01392-y.
SN - 1612-4782
SN - 1612-4790
ER -