Abstract
In a dual-task paradigm, participants performed a spatial location working memory task and a forced two-choice perceptual decision task (neutral vs. fearful) with gradually morphed emotional faces (neutral ∼ fearful). Task-irrelevant word distractors (negative, neutral, and control) were experimentally manipulated during spatial working memory encoding. We hypothesized that, if affective perception is influenced by concurrent cognitive load using a working memory task, task-irrelevant emotional distractors would bias subsequent perceptual decision-making on ambiguous facial expression. We found that when either neutral or negative emotional words were presented as task-irrelevant working-memory distractors, participants more frequently reported fearful face perception - but only at the higher emotional intensity levels of morphed faces. Also, the affective perception bias due to negative emotional distractors correlated with a decrease in working memory performance. Taken together, our findings suggest that concurrent working memory load by task-irrelevant distractors has an impact on affective perception of facial expressions.
Highlights
Facial expression perception is known to be universal across different cultures to a certain extent [1,2], but not entirely [3]
Working Memory Task We compared the accuracies of spatial working memory (WM) trials across the three experimental conditions
No significant difference was found in the estimated n and M parameters, F(2,74) = 0.43, n.s.; F(2,74) = 0.39, n.s. These results indicate that the task-irrelevant negative word content presented during the WM sample period had a subsequent influence on perceptual decision-making, characterized by increases in fear decisions at the high intensity levels of emotional expression
Summary
Facial expression perception is known to be universal across different cultures to a certain extent [1,2], but not entirely [3]. Emotionally ambiguous faces (50% fearful) were perceived as more fearful when threatening surrounding images were concurrently presented, while emotionally ambiguous faces (50% fearful) were perceived as less fearful when positive surrounding images were currently presented [8]. This contextual effect has been observed even when participants were instructed to make their decision exclusively based on facial stimuli while disregarding the contextual information, suggesting the automaticity of emotional face-context integration [14,15]. This emphasizes that the contextual features surrounding the faces can have a critical and inevitable role on facial emotion perception
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