Kandemir Güven, Akyürek Elkan G, Nieuwenstein Mark R
Experimental Psychology, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands.
PLoS One. 2017 Jan 19;12(1):e0169927. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0169927. eCollection 2017.
While many studies have shown that a task-irrelevant emotionally arousing stimulus can interfere with the processing of a shortly following target, it remains unclear whether an emotional stimulus can also retro-actively interrupt the ongoing processing of an earlier target. In two experiments, we examined whether the presentation of a negative emotionally arousing picture can disrupt working memory consolidation of a preceding visual target. In both experiments, the effects of negative emotional pictures were compared with the effects of neutral pictures. In Experiment 1, the pictures were entirely task-irrelevant whereas in Experiment 2 the pictures were associated with a 2-alternative forced choice task that required participants to respond to the color of a frame surrounding the pictures. The results showed that the appearance of the pictures did not interfere with target consolidation when the pictures were task-irrelevant, whereas such interference was observed when the pictures were associated with a 2-AFC task. Most importantly, however, the results showed no effects of whether the picture had neutral or emotional content. Implications for further research are discussed.
虽然许多研究表明，与任务无关的情绪唤起刺激会干扰紧随其后的目标的加工，但情绪刺激是否也能追溯性地中断对先前目标的正在进行的加工仍不清楚。在两项实验中，我们研究了呈现负面情绪唤起图片是否会破坏先前视觉目标的工作记忆巩固。在两项实验中，都将负面情绪图片的效果与中性图片的效果进行了比较。在实验1中，图片完全与任务无关，而在实验2中，图片与一个二选一的强制选择任务相关联，该任务要求参与者对图片周围框架的颜色做出反应。结果表明，当图片与任务无关时，图片的出现不会干扰目标巩固，而当图片与二选一强制选择任务相关联时，则会观察到这种干扰。然而，最重要的是，结果显示图片具有中性还是情绪内容并无影响。文中讨论了对进一步研究的启示。
