Department of Psychology, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
Department of Psychology, University of Winnipeg, Canada.
Br J Psychol. 2019 May;110(2):428-448. doi: 10.1111/bjop.12324. Epub 2018 Jul 13.
Previous research has identified numerous factors affecting the capacity and accuracy of visual working memory (VWM). One potentially important factor is the emotionality of the stimuli to be encoded and held in VWM. We often must hold in VWM information that is emotionally charged, but much is still unknown about how the emotionality of stimuli impacts VWM performance. In the current research, we performed four studies examining the impact of fearful facial expressions on VWM for faces. Fearful expressions were found to produce a consistent cost to VWM performance. This cost was modulated by encoding time, but not set size. This cost was only present for faces in an upright orientation consistent with this cost being a product of the emotionality of the faces rather than lower-level perceptual differences between neutral and fearful faces. These findings are discussed in the context of existing theoretical accounts of the impact of emotion on information processing. We suggest that a number of competing effects drive both costs and benefits and are at play when emotional information must be stored in VWM, with the task context determining the balance between them.
先前的研究已经确定了许多影响视觉工作记忆（VWM）容量和准确性的因素。一个潜在的重要因素是待编码和保持在 VWM 中的刺激的情绪性。我们经常必须在 VWM 中保持情绪化的信息，但关于刺激的情绪性如何影响 VWM 表现，我们还有很多未知。在当前的研究中，我们进行了四项研究，考察了恐惧面部表情对 VWM 中面孔的影响。研究发现，恐惧表情对面孔 VWM 表现产生了一致的代价。这种代价受到编码时间的调节，但不受集合大小的调节。这种代价仅存在于正面的面孔中，这表明这种代价是面孔的情绪性的产物，而不是中性和恐惧面孔之间的低级知觉差异。这些发现结合了现有的关于情绪对信息处理影响的理论解释进行了讨论。我们认为，当必须在 VWM 中存储情绪信息时，许多相互竞争的效应会产生成本和收益，而任务背景则决定了它们之间的平衡。
