Institute of Brain and Psychological Sciences, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, China.
Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland.
J Vis. 2023 Jan 3;23(1):10. doi: 10.1167/jov.23.1.10.
Task-irrelevant threatening faces (e.g., fearful) are difficult to filter from visual working memory (VWM), but the difficulty in filtering non-threatening negative faces (e.g., sad) is not known. Depressive symptoms could also potentially affect the ability to filter different emotional faces. We tested the filtering of task-irrelevant sad and fearful faces by depressed and control participants performing a color-change detection task. The VWM storage of distractors was indicated by contralateral delay activity, a specific event-related potential index for the number of objects stored in VWM during the maintenance phase. The control group did not store sad face distractors, but they automatically stored fearful face distractors, suggesting that threatening faces are specifically difficult to filter from VWM in non-depressed individuals. By contrast, depressed participants showed no additional consumption of VWM resources for either the distractor condition or the non-distractor condition, possibly suggesting that neither fearful nor sad face distractors were maintained in VWM. Our control group results confirm previous findings of a threat-related filtering difficulty in the normal population while also suggesting that task-irrelevant non-threatening negative faces do not automatically load into VWM. The novel finding of the lack of negative distractors within VWM storage in participants with depressive symptoms may reflect a decreased overall responsiveness to negative facial stimuli. Future studies should investigate the mechanisms underlying distractor filtering in depressed populations.
无关任务的威胁性面孔（例如，恐惧）难以从视觉工作记忆（VWM）中过滤，但非威胁性负性面孔（例如，悲伤）的过滤难度尚不清楚。抑郁症状也可能会影响对不同情绪面孔的过滤能力。我们通过抑郁和对照组参与者执行颜色变化检测任务来测试对无关的悲伤和恐惧面孔的过滤。通过对侧延迟活动来指示分心物的 VWM 存储，这是 VWM 中在维持阶段存储的对象数量的特定事件相关电位指标。对照组没有存储悲伤面孔的分心物，但他们会自动存储恐惧面孔的分心物，这表明威胁面孔在非抑郁个体中特别难以从 VWM 中过滤。相比之下，抑郁组参与者在分心条件或非分心条件下均未消耗额外的 VWM 资源，这可能表明无论是恐惧还是悲伤面孔的分心物都未在 VWM 中保持。我们的对照组结果证实了先前在正常人群中存在与威胁相关的过滤困难的发现，同时还表明无关的非威胁性负性面孔不会自动加载到 VWM 中。在有抑郁症状的参与者中 VWM 存储中缺乏负性分心物的新发现可能反映出对负性面部刺激的总体反应性降低。未来的研究应该调查抑郁人群中分心物过滤的机制。
