Competition between emotional faces in visuospatial working memory.

Visuospatial working memory (VSWM) helps track the identity and location of people during social interactions. Previous work showed better VSWM when all faces at encoding displayed a happy compared to an angry expression, reflecting a prosocial preference for monitoring who was where. However, social environments are not typically uniform, and certain expressions may more strongly compete for and bias face monitoring according to valence and/or arousal properties. Here, we used heterogeneous encoding displays in which two faces shared one emotion and two shared another, and asked participants to relocate a central neutral probe face after a blank delay. When considering the emotion of the probed face independently of the co-occurring emotion at encoding, an overall happy benefit was replicated. However, accuracy was modulated by the nonprobed emotion, with a relocation benefit for angry over sad, happy over fearful, and sad over happy faces. These effects did not depend on encoding fixation time, stimulus arousal, perceptual similarity, or response bias. Thus, emotional competition for faces in VSWM is complex and appears to rely on more than simple arousal- or valence-biased mechanisms. We propose a "social value (SV)" account to better explain when and why certain emotions may be prioritized in VSWM. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Attentional load effects on emotional content in face working memory.

This study investigated the role of attentional resources in processing emotional faces in working memory (WM). Participants memorised two face arrays with the same emotion but different identities and were required to judge whether the test face had the same identity as one of the previous faces. Concurrently during encoding and maintenance, a sequence of high- or low-pitched tones (high load) or white noise bursts (low load) was presented, and participants were required to count how many low-tones were heard. Experiments 1 and 2 used an emotional and neutral test face, respectively. The results revealed a significant WM impairment for sad and angry faces in the high-load versus low-load condition but not for happy faces. In Experiment 1, participants remembered happy faces better than other emotional faces. In contrast, Experiment 2 showed that performance was poorer for happy than sad faces but not for angry faces. This evidence suggests that depleting attentional resources has less impact on WM for happy faces than other emotional faces, but also that differential effects on WM for emotional faces depend on the presence or absence of emotion in the probe face at retrieval.

Increased perceptual distraction and task demand enhances gaze and non-biological cuing effects.

This study aims to improve understanding of how distracting information and target task demands influence the strength of gaze and non-biological (arrow and moving line) cuing effects. Using known non-predictive central cues, we manipulated the degree of distraction from additional information presented on the other side of the target, and target task difficulty. In Experiment 1, we used the traditional unilateral cuing task, where participants state the location of an asterisk and the non-target location is empty (no distraction). Experiment 2 comprised a harder localisation task (which side contains an embedded oddball item) and presented distracting target-related information on the other side. In Experiment 3, we used a discrimination task (upright or inverted embedded T) with distracter information that was unrelated or related to the target (low vs. high distraction, respectively). We found that the magnitude of cuing scaled with the degree of combined distraction and task demands, increasing up to six-fold from Experiments 1 and 2 to the high-distraction condition in Experiment 3. Thus, depleting attentional resources in this manner appears to weaken the ability to ignore uninformative directional cues. Findings are discussed within the framework of a resource-limited account of cue inhibition.

A cross-cultural investigation into the influence of eye gaze on working memory for happy and angry faces.

Previous long-term memory (LTM) research found that angry faces were more poorly recognised when encoded with averted vs. direct gaze, while memory for happy faces was unaffected by gaze. Contrastingly, working memory (WM) accuracy for angry faces was unaffected by gaze, but WM was enhanced for happy faces with averted vs. direct gaze. Because the LTM study was conducted in an Eastern culture (Japan) with Japanese faces, while the WM study was conducted in a Western culture (UK) with Caucasian faces, here we investigated WM further to examine whether gaze effects diverge due to cultural variation between the faces and participants. When Western participants viewed Japanese faces (Experiment 1), the happy-averted gaze advantage in WM was replicated. In contrast, Japanese participants viewing Caucasian faces (Experiment 2a) showed poorer WM for angry faces with averted vs. direct gaze, and no influence of gaze on WM for happy faces. When Japanese participants viewed Japanese faces (Experiment 2b), gaze did not modulate WM. Therefore, the way in which expression and gaze interact to influence face WM does not appear to rely on the specific memory system engaged, but instead may be attributed to cultural differences in display rules between Eastern and Western cultures.

Task cues lead to item-level backward inhibition with univalent stimuli and responses.

Backward inhibition may aid our ability to switch between tasks by counteracting the tendency to repeat a recently performed task. Current theory asserts that conflict between tasks during performance plays a key role in inducing the effect. However, a study by Costa and Friedrich suggests that backward inhibition might occur without this type of conflict being present. To better understand the mechanisms underlying backward inhibition, we investigated the roles of between-task conflict, task-based instructions, and task cues. Experiment 1 tentatively supported the view that conflict between tasks is not necessary for backward inhibition to be present, and suggested that either the use of task-based instructions or the provision of specific task cues might be sufficient to generate the effect. Experiment 2 ruled out task-based instruction as a likely cause of backward inhibition in this context. Experiment 3 showed that the provision of task cues was sufficient to drive a significant backward inhibition effect, but only when stimuli and responses (as well as tasks) repeated. Overall, these results indicate that between-task conflict during performance is not necessary for backward inhibition to be applied, and that task cues have a key role in generating the effect.

Effects of induced sad mood on facial emotion perception in young and older adults.

Older adults perceive less intense negative emotion in facial expressions compared to younger counterparts. Prior research has also demonstrated that mood alters facial emotion perception. Nevertheless, there is little evidence which evaluates the interactive effects of age and mood on emotion perception. This study investigated the effects of sad mood on younger and older adults' perception of emotional and neutral faces. Participants rated the intensity of stimuli while listening to sad music and in silence. Measures of mood were administered. Younger and older participants' rated sad faces as displaying stronger sadness when they experienced sad mood. While younger participants showed no influence of sad mood on happiness ratings of happy faces, older adults rated happy faces as conveying less happiness when they experienced sad mood. This study demonstrates how emotion perception can change when a controlled mood induction procedure is applied to alter mood in young and older participants.

Barriers block the effect of joint attention on working memory: Perspective taking matters.

Joint focus of attention between two individuals can influence the way that observers attend, encode, and value items. Using a nonpredictive gaze cuing task we previously found that working memory (WM) was better for jointly attended (validly cued) versus invalidly cued colored squares. Here we examine whether this influence of gaze on WM is driven by observers sharing the perspective of the face cue (mental state account), or simply by increased attention to the cued location (social attention account). To manipulate perspective taking, a closed barrier obstructed the cue face's view of the memoranda, while an open barrier allowed the cue face to "see" the colors. A central cue face flanked by two identical barriers looked left or right, followed 500 ms later by colored squares for encoding which appeared equally often in the validly and invalidly cued locations. After a blank 1,000 ms maintenance interval, participants stated whether a probe color was present or not in the preceding display. When the barrier was open, WM was significantly impaired for invalidly versus validly cued items. When the barrier was closed, the effect of gaze cues on WM was abolished. In contrast, further experiments showed a significant cuing effect on the speed of simple target localization and color discrimination regardless of barrier type. These findings support the mental state account of joint attention in WM, whereby the attentional focus of another alters WM via higher level engagement with the second person perspective. A goal-specific model of perspective taking is proposed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Remembering who was where: A happy expression advantage for face identity-location binding in working memory.

It is well established that visual working memory (WM) for face identity is enhanced when faces display threatening versus nonthreatening expressions. During social interaction, it is also important to bind person identity with location information in WM to remember who was where, but we lack a clear understanding of how emotional expression influences this. Here, we conducted two touchscreen experiments to investigate how angry versus happy expressions displayed at encoding influenced the precision with which participants relocated a single neutral test face to its original position. Maintenance interval was manipulated (Experiment 2; 1 s, 3 s, 6 s) to assess durability of binding. In both experiments, relocation accuracy was enhanced when faces were happy versus angry, and this happy benefit endured from 1-s to 6-s maintenance interval. Eye movement measures during encoding showed no convincing effects of oculomotor behavior that could readily explain the happy benefit. However, accuracy in general was improved, and the happy benefit was strongest for the last, most recent face fixated at encoding. Improved, durable binding of who was where in the presence of a happy expression may reflect the importance of prosocial navigation. (PsycINFO Database Record

Eye gaze influences working memory for happy but not angry faces.

Previous research has shown that angry and happy faces are perceived as less emotionally intense when shown with averted versus direct gaze. Other work reports that long-term memory (LTM) for angry (but not happy) faces was poorer when they were encoded with averted versus direct gaze, suggesting that threat signals are diluted when eye contact is not engaged. The current study examined whether gaze modulates working memory (WM) for angry and happy faces. In stark contrast to LTM effects, WM for angry faces was not significantly modulated by gaze direction. However, WM for happy faces was significantly enhanced when gaze was averted versus direct. These findings suggest that in WM - when rapid processing and an immediate response is required - averted gaze may alter the meaning behind a smile, and make this kind of expression particularly salient for short-term processing.

Face working memory deficits in developmental prosopagnosia: Tests of encoding limits and updating processes.

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a condition in which individuals experience life-long problems recognising faces. In recent years, unpacking the nature of the impairments of this population has been the focus of numerous studies. One focus has been on the nature of face-based memory impairments for such individuals, with the onus being mainly on long-term memory deficits. Far fewer have considered the nature of face-based working memory (WM) impairments for DP cases, and the current study seeks to address this. One recent WM study (Shah et al., 2015) reported that the maintenance of faces over time in WM was spared among DPs, and argued instead that face encoding was limited in some way. Here we further explore the nature of face-based WM impairments in DP across two experiments designed to probe encoding limits (Experiment 1) and WM updating processes (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1 we manipulated the number of faces (1-4) to encode into WM and presented these simultaneously. We reasoned that if face encoding among DPs was inefficient or imprecise, then increasing encoding demands (WM load) would disproportionately impair WM accuracy compared to controls. However, we found that DP cases were consistently poorer than controls across all face load conditions, suggesting that front-end encoding problems are only part of the deficit. In Experiment 2, to measure updating four faces were shown sequentially for encoding into WM and accuracy was analysed as a function of whether the test face had been presented first, second, third or last in the encoding sequence. DPs had significantly poorer WM than controls for later faces but not the first face encoded in the sequence, and showed an attenuated recency effect. To account for these findings, we discuss the potential role of comparison processes at retrieval, impairments in configural face processing, and the impact of noise in the face identification system of individuals with DP.

Joint attention enhances visual working memory.

Joint attention-the mutual focus of 2 individuals on an item-speeds detection and discrimination of target information. However, what happens to that information beyond the initial perceptual episode? To fully comprehend and engage with our immediate environment also requires working memory (WM), which integrates information from second to second to create a coherent and fluid picture of our world. Yet, no research exists at present that examines how joint attention directly impacts WM. To investigate this, we created a unique paradigm that combines gaze cues with a traditional visual WM task. A central, direct gaze 'cue' face looked left or right, followed 500 ms later by 4, 6, or 8 colored squares presented on one side of the face for encoding. Crucially, the cue face either looked at the squares (valid cue) or looked away from them (invalid cue). A no shift (direct gaze) condition served as a baseline. After a blank 1,000 ms maintenance interval, participants stated whether a single test square color was present or not in the preceding display. WM accuracy was significantly greater for colors encoded in the valid versus invalid and direct conditions. Further experiments showed that an arrow cue and a low-level motion cue-both shown to reliably orient attention-did not reliably modulate WM, indicating that social cues are more powerful. This study provides the first direct evidence that sharing the focus of another individual establishes a point of reference from which information is advantageously encoded into WM. (PsycINFO Database Record

Variation in normal mood state influences sensitivity to dynamic changes in emotional expression.

Normal social functioning depends on the ability to efficiently and accurately detect when someone's facial expression changes to convey positive or negative emotion. While observer mood state has been shown to influence emotion recognition, how variations in normal mood might influence sensitivity to the dynamic emergence of expressions has not yet been addressed. To investigate this, we modified an existing face-morphing paradigm in which a central face gradually changes from neutral to expressive (angry, sad, happy, surprised). Our sample comprised healthy young adults, and current mood state was measured using the PANAS-X. Participants pressed a key as soon as they (1) noticed a physical change in expression (perceptual sensitivity-novel task element), and (2) could clearly conceptualize which expression was emerging (conceptual sensitivity). A final unspeeded response required participants to explicitly label the expression as a measure of recognition accuracy. We measured the percentage morph (expression intensity) at which a perceptual and conceptual change was detected, where greater intensity equates to poorer sensitivity. Increased positive mood reduced perceptual and conceptual sensitivity to angry and sad expressions only (a mood incongruency effect). Of particular interest, increased negative mood decreased conceptual sensitivity for all expressions, but had limited impact on perceptual sensitivity. Thus, heightened negative mood is particularly detrimental for effectively decoding someone else's mood change. This may reflect greater introspection and consumption of attentional resources directed toward the negative self, leaving fewer resources to process emotional signals conveyed by others. This could have important consequences for human social interaction.

Similarity, not complexity, determines visual working memory performance.

A number of studies have shown that visual working memory (WM) is poorer for complex versus simple items, traditionally accounted for by higher information load placing greater demands on encoding and storage capacity limits. Other research suggests that it may not be complexity that determines WM performance per se, but rather increased perceptual similarity between complex items as a result of a large amount of overlapping information. Increased similarity is thought to lead to greater comparison errors between items encoded into WM and the test item(s) presented at retrieval. However, previous studies have used different object categories to manipulate complexity and similarity, raising questions as to whether these effects are simply due to cross-category differences. For the first time, here the relationship between complexity and similarity in WM using the same stimulus category (abstract polygons) are investigated. The authors used a delayed discrimination task to measure WM for 1-4 complex versus simple simultaneously presented items and manipulated the similarity between the single test item at retrieval and the sample items at encoding. WM was poorer for complex than simple items only when the test item was similar to 1 of the encoding items, and not when it was dissimilar or identical. The results provide clear support for reinterpretation of the complexity effect in WM as a similarity effect and highlight the importance of the retrieval stage in governing WM performance. The authors discuss how these findings can be reconciled with current models of WM capacity limits.

Angry expressions strengthen the encoding and maintenance of face identity representations in visual working memory.

Visual working memory (WM) for face identities is enhanced when faces express negative versus positive emotion. To determine the stage at which emotion exerts its influence on memory for person information, we isolated expression (angry/happy) to the encoding phase (Experiment 1; neutral test faces) or retrieval phase (Experiment 2; neutral study faces). WM was only enhanced by anger when expression was present at encoding, suggesting that retrieval mechanisms are not influenced by emotional expression. To examine whether emotional information is discarded on completion of encoding or sustained in WM, in Experiment 3 an emotional word categorisation task was inserted into the maintenance interval. Emotional congruence between word and face supported memory for angry but not for happy faces, suggesting that negative emotional information is preferentially sustained during WM maintenance. Our findings demonstrate that negative expressions exert sustained and beneficial effects on WM for faces that extend beyond encoding.

A threatening face in the crowd: effects of emotional singletons on visual working memory.

Faces with threatening versus positive expressions are better remembered in visual working memory (WM) and are especially effective at capturing attention. We asked how the presence of a single threatening or happy face affects WM for concurrently viewed faces with neutral expressions. If threat captures attention and attention determines WM, then a WM performance cost for neutral faces should be evident. However, if threat boosts processing in an object-specific, noncompetitive manner, then no such costs should be produced. Participants viewed three neutral and one angry or happy face for 2 s. Face recognition was tested 1 s later. Although WM was better for singletons than nonsingletons and better for angry versus happy singletons, WM for neutral faces remained unaffected by either singleton. These results, combined with eye movement and response time analyses, argue against a selective attention account of threat-based benefits to WM and support object-specific enhancement via threat processing.

ZNF804A genotype modulates neural activity during working memory for faces.

BACKGROUND: Genetic susceptibility to schizophrenia (SZ) has been suggested to influence the cortical systems supporting working memory (WM) and face processing. Genetic imaging studies link the SZ risk variant rs1344706 on the ZNF804A gene to psychosis via alterations in functional brain connectivity during WM, but no work has looked at the effects of ZNF804A on WM with face-processing components. METHODS: We therefore investigated healthy controls that were genotyped for rs1344706 with a face WM task during functional magnetic resonance imaging. We suggested that variation at the rs1344706 locus would be associated with similar alterations as patients previously tested using the same WM task for faces. RESULTS: The rs1344706 risk allele was indeed associated with altered activation in the right dorsolateral prefrontal (rDLPFC) cortex. We established that the rDLPFC was activated in a task-dependent manner, suggesting that the differences in activation between rs1344706 genotype groups reflected alterations in task processing. Furthermore, we demonstrated that the rDLPFC region showed significant volumetric overlap with the rDLPFC which had previously been reported to be altered during task processing for patients with SZ. CONCLUSIONS: The findings support an association between rs1344706 and alterations in DLPFC activity during WM for faces. We further suggest that WM for faces may be a useful intermediate phenotype in the investigation of genetic susceptibility to psychosis.

Frontal and parietal theta burst TMS impairs working memory for visual-spatial conjunctions.

In tasks that selectively probe visual or spatial working memory (WM) frontal and posterior cortical areas show a segregation, with dorsal areas preferentially involved in spatial (e.g. location) WM and ventral areas in visual (e.g. object identity) WM. In a previous fMRI study [1], we showed that right parietal cortex (PC) was more active during WM for orientation, whereas left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) was more active during colour WM. During WM for colour-orientation conjunctions, activity in these areas was intermediate to the level of activity for the single task preferred and non-preferred information. To examine whether these specialised areas play a critical role in coordinating visual and spatial WM to perform a conjunction task, we used theta burst transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to induce a functional deficit. Compared to sham stimulation, TMS to right PC or left IFG selectively impaired WM for conjunctions but not single features. This is consistent with findings from visual search paradigms, in which frontal and parietal TMS selectively affects search for conjunctions compared to single features, and with combined TMS and functional imaging work suggesting that parietal and frontal regions are functionally coupled in tasks requiring integration of visual and spatial information. Our results thus elucidate mechanisms by which the brain coordinates spatially segregated processing streams and have implications beyond the field of working memory.

"Distracters" Do Not Always Distract: Visual Working Memory for Angry Faces is Enhanced by Incidental Emotional Words.

We are often required to filter out distraction in order to focus on a primary task during which working memory (WM) is engaged. Previous research has shown that negative versus neutral distracters presented during a visual WM maintenance period significantly impair memory for neutral information. However, the contents of WM are often also emotional in nature. The question we address here is how incidental information might impact upon visual WM when both this and the memory items contain emotional information. We presented emotional versus neutral words during the maintenance interval of an emotional visual WM faces task. Participants encoded two angry or happy faces into WM, and several seconds into a 9 s maintenance period a negative, positive, or neutral word was flashed on the screen three times. A single neutral test face was presented for retrieval with a face identity that was either present or absent in the preceding study array. WM for angry face identities was significantly better when an emotional (negative or positive) versus neutral (or no) word was presented. In contrast, WM for happy face identities was not significantly affected by word valence. These findings suggest that the presence of emotion within an intervening stimulus boosts the emotional value of threat-related information maintained in visual WM and thus improves performance. In addition, we show that incidental events that are emotional in nature do not always distract from an ongoing WM task.

Validation of food diaries as measures of dietary behaviour change.

This study aimed to validate the ability of a 24-h food diary (the DIET-24) to accurately detect change in children's fruit and vegetable consumption at school snack time following implementation of the Food Dudes healthy eating intervention. Participants were 4- to 9-year-old children from two primary schools in England. There were 148 participants in the intervention school and 43 participants in the no intervention control school. For each child, snack-time fruit and vegetable consumption was measured separately by weight (grammes), and compared with teachers' estimates (to the nearest half portion) using the DIET-24. Both consumption measures were taken at T1 (pre-intervention) and T2 (post-intervention). At each time-point, Spearman rank correlations between the two measures were low to moderate, but significant. However, when compared with weighed measures, the DIET-24 did not always accurately detect significant changes in children's fruit and vegetable consumption following the intervention. To provide sensitive measures of behaviour change, it is important that dietary measures assess as accurately as possible the amount of food consumed, rather than, as is often the case, rely on all-or-none portion estimates. This issue is important for the establishment of a reliable evidence-base for healthy eating interventions.

Sad benefit in face working memory: an emotional bias of melancholic depression.

Emotion biases feature prominently in cognitive theories of depression and are a focus of psychological interventions. However, there is presently no stable neurocognitive marker of altered emotion-cognition interactions in depression. One reason may be the heterogeneity of major depressive disorder. Our aim in the present study was to find an emotional bias that differentiates patients with melancholic depression from controls, and patients with melancholic from those with non-melancholic depression. We used a working memory paradigm for emotional faces, where two faces with angry, happy, neutral, sad or fearful expression had to be retained over one second. Twenty patients with melancholic depression, 20 age-, education- and gender-matched control participants and 20 patients with non-melancholic depression participated in the study. We analysed performance on the working memory task using signal detection measures. We found an interaction between group and emotion on working memory performance that was driven by the higher performance for sad faces compared to other categories in the melancholic group. We computed a measure of "sad benefit", which distinguished melancholic and non-melancholic patients with good sensitivity and specificity. However, replication studies and formal discriminant analysis will be needed in order to assess whether emotion bias in working memory may become a useful diagnostic tool to distinguish these two syndromes.