Abstract
Emotionally salient stimuli have the ability to disrupt cognitive processing. This kind of disruption involves effects on working memory and may be related to mental health problems. To explore the nature of such emotional interference on working memory, a Virtual Attack Emotional Sternberg Task (VAEST) was used. Neutral faces were presented as distractors and warning signals, which were sometimes followed by a virtual attack, created by having the neutral face turn angry while the image was enlarged. The attack was hypothesized to have one of two effects: to disrupt cognitive processing and thereby increase interference effects, or to terminate a state of freezing and thereby reduce interference effects. The task was successfully completed online by a sample of 59 students. Results clearly show that the virtual attack caused a reduction of interference relative to no-attack trials. The apparent cognitive disruption caused by emotional distractors may thus reflect freezing, which can be reversed by a freeze-terminating stimulus.
Highlights
Salient stimuli have the ability to disrupt cognitive processing
Trials in the basic Sternberg task consist of three phases: an encoding phase in which participants are presented with a memory set of items; a maintenance phase in which the memory set must be held in working memory (Baddeley, 1992, 2012; Kane & Engle, 2003; Petrides & Baddeley, 1996; Postle, 2006); and a probe phase in which it is tested whether the memory set has been successfully maintained
In the Baseline task, within-subject analyses showed an effect of Distractor Type, F(1, 58) = 24, p < .001, ηp2 = 0.29, due to slower responses following Neutral Face than Null distractors
Summary
Participants were recruited from a student population and received study credits for completing the study, which was performed online. Trials began with the presentation of a memory set of three different numbers from 1 to 9, positioned in a vertical column, for 1200 ms This was followed by a maintenance period of 800, 1200, or 1800 ms; the duration was selected randomly per trial with equal probabilities. The distractors were onscreen during the full maintenance period This task consisted of three blocks of 24 trials each. Attack distractors initially started as Neutral Face distractors for the first 600 ms of the maintenance period After this time, the expression was changed to anger and the size of the face was increased by 50%, creating a zoom-in effect. Trials consisted of a fixation cross, presentation of the memory set, maintenance period, and probe stimulus. We show an Attack trial, in which the first 600 ms of the maintenance period contained a neutral face. On Null trials, no face appeared, and only a fixation cross was shown during the maintenance period
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