Mood and spatial memory: emotion and right hemisphere contribution to spatial cognition

Abstract

Depressed persons show an impairment of spatial cognition that may reflect the influence of affective arousal on right hemisphere cognition. We examined normal university students to determine whether individual differences in mood and arousal levels would be related to performance on a spatial memory task. Right-hemisphere specialization for this spatial memory task was confirmed by a left field advantage for the targets and this field asymmetry was enhanced as task difficulty was increased. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs), assessed with a 64-channel sensor array, showed a processing negativity contralateral to the target in the P300 interval (300–500 ms after the target appeared). This effect increased as task difficulty was increased. A stronger posterior negativity for good (rather than bad) targets may suggest that attention was allocated toward the good locations. A suggestion of right hemisphere sensitivity to mood in this normal sample was a tendency for the subjects high in Negative Arousal not to show the normal right hemisphere (left field) superiority for the spatial memory task. Interestingly, a medial frontal lobe negativity was elicited in the ERPs by the bad targets, perhaps paralleling the error-related negativity observed in other paradigms. This medial frontal negativity was also seen in response to the feedback stimulus for the bad targets. Motivation may be important to this frontal effect: It was enhanced for subjects describing themselves as high in either positive or negative affective arousal during the task.