Abstract
Effects of emotional content on working memory performance and the underlying neural mechanism were explored in this study, with a time-locked delayed matching-to-sample task (DMST) and a high-temporal resolution event-related potential (ERP) technique. Faster RTs and higher accuracy were observed in positive stimuli, while slower RTs and lower accuracy in negative stimuli. At encoding, an enhanced anterior P2 component was elicited by negative compared to neutral stimuli; at retention, the sustained slow wave (SW) showed a more positive deflection for both positive and negative stimuli compared to neutral stimuli during early and middle periods; at retrieval, a significant N400 old-new effect was observed and this effect for positive stimuli tended to be largest. The findings suggest that positive stimuli enhance working memory performance by facilitating retention and retrieval processing, while negative stimuli impede working memory performance as the negative emotion may be avoided during retrieval in spite of privileged processing during previous encoding and retention.
This research was partially supported by National Nature Science Foundation of China (NSFC 30930031, 30900441), National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program, 2011CB711001), National Key Technologies R&D Program (2009BAI77B01), Global Research Initiative Program (GRIP, NIH 1R01TW007897) and Key Laboratory of Mental Health of Institute of Psychology of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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Jin, YX., Li, XB., Luo, YJ. (2013). Effects of Emotional Content on Working Memory: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence. In: Liu, D., Alippi, C., Zhao, D., Hussain, A. (eds) Advances in Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems. BICS 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7888. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38786-9_16
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