Abstract
ABSTRACTIn our everyday life, we frequently switch between different tasks, a faculty that changes with age. However, it is still not understood how emotion impacts on age-related changes in task switching. Using faces with emotional and neutral expressions, Experiment 1 investigated younger (n = 29; 18–38 years old) and older adults’ (n = 32; 61–80 years old) ability to switch between an emotional and a non-emotional task (i.e. responding to the face's expression vs. age). In Experiment 2, younger and older adults also viewed emotional and neutral faces, but switched between two non-emotional tasks (i.e. responding to the face's age vs. gender). Data from Experiment 1 demonstrated that switching from an emotional to a non-emotional task was slower when the expression of the new face was emotional rather than neutral. This impairment was observed in both age groups. In contrast, Experiment 2 revealed that neither younger nor older adults were affected by block-wise irrelevant emotion when switching between two non-emotional tasks. Overall, the findings suggest that task-irrelevant emotion can impair task switching through reactivation of the competing emotional task set. They also suggest that this effect and the ability to shield task-switching performance from block-wise irrelevant emotion are preserved in ageing.
Highlights
Switching between different tasks is so common in everyday life that we are often not even aware that we perform task switching
The ability to switch between tasks is a core executive function that plays an important role in everyday functioning (Miyake & Friedman, 2012; Miyake et al, 2000) and given evidence that emotion can affect executive functions (Pessoa, 2009, 2015, 2017), research has started to assess interactions between emotion and task switching (Aboulafia-Brakha, Manuel, & Ptak, 2016; de Vries & Geurts, 2012; Gul & Khan, 2014; Johnson, 2009; Paulitzki, Risko, Oakman, & Stolz, 2008; Piguet et al, 2013, 2016; Reeck & Egner, 2015)
No further significant main effects or interactions were observed for RTs for angry vs. neutral faces
Summary
Switching between different tasks is so common in everyday life that we are often not even aware that we perform task switching. Gul and Khan (2014) used happy faces, whereas only negative (e.g. threat-related pictures) or a mix of positive and negative items (e.g. happy and angry faces) were used as emotional material in other studies (Johnson, 2009; Paulitzki et al, 2008; Reeck & Egner, 2015; Schuch et al, 2012) This might have contributed to different patterns of results. It is possible that there were differences between switch costs for emotional and non-emotional tasks due to effects on repeat rather than on switch trials
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