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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Strategic resource allocation in the human brain supports cognitive coordination of object and spatial working memory.

The ability to integrate different types of information (e.g., object identity and spatial orientation) and maintain or manipulate them concurrently in working memory (WM) facilitates the flow of ongoing tasks and is essential for normal human cognition. Research shows that object and spatial information is maintained and manipulated in WM via separate pathways in the brain (object/ventral versus spatial/dorsal). How does the human brain coordinate the activity of different specialized systems to conjoin different types of information? Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate conjunction- versus single-task manipulation of object (compute average color blend) and spatial (compute intermediate angle) information in WM. Object WM was associated with ventral (inferior frontal gyrus, occipital cortex), and spatial WM with dorsal (parietal cortex, superior frontal, and temporal sulci) regions. Conjoined object/spatial WM resulted in intermediate activity in these specialized areas, but greater activity in different prefrontal and parietal areas. Unique to our study, we found lower temporo-occipital activity and greater deactivation in temporal and medial prefrontal cortices for conjunction- versus single-tasks. Using structural equation modeling, we derived a conjunction-task connectivity model that comprises a frontoparietal network with a bidirectional DLPFC-VLPFC connection, and a direct parietal-extrastriate pathway. We suggest that these activation/deactivation patterns reflect efficient resource allocation throughout the brain and propose a new extended version of the biased competition model of WM.

Brain activity supporting working memory accuracy in patients with paranoid schizophrenia: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study.

BACKGROUND: Dysfunctional working memory (WM) has been recognized as one of the most consistent deficits in schizophrenia. Studies that investigated the neural correlates of WM-related pathology by comparing patients with schizophrenia and control participants have produced controversial results, reporting task-related hyper- or hypoactivity in frontoparietal networks. METHOD: We addressed this question by comparing BOLD signals for accurate responses during a WM task for emotional faces between a homogeneous group of high-performing patients and a control group. RESULTS: Our results confirm previous findings of left prefrontal hyperactivity contrasted with hypoactivity in right prefrontal cortex to support WM performance. We also extend previous work by reporting enhanced activity in higher visual areas of patients during encoding and maintenance. CONCLUSION: Our findings and those of the literature can be integrated into a model, where preserved visual cognition in high-functioning patients with hypofrontality is explained by activation of contralateral homologue areas combined with enhanced recruitment of sensory areas.

Neural signatures of stimulus features in visual working memory--a spatiotemporal approach.

We examined the neural signatures of stimulus features in visual working memory (WM) by integrating functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related potential data recorded during mental manipulation of colors, rotation angles, and color-angle conjunctions. The N200, negative slow wave, and P3b were modulated by the information content of WM, and an fMRI-constrained source model revealed a progression in neural activity from posterior visual areas to higher order areas in the ventral and dorsal processing streams. Color processing was associated with activity in inferior frontal gyrus during encoding and retrieval, whereas angle processing involved right parietal regions during the delay interval. WM for color-angle conjunctions did not involve any additional neural processes. The finding that different patterns of brain activity underlie WM for color and spatial information is consistent with ideas that the ventral/dorsal "what/where" segregation of perceptual processing influences WM organization. The absence of characteristic signatures of conjunction-related brain activity, which was generally intermediate between the 2 single conditions, suggests that conjunction judgments are based on the coordinated activity of these 2 streams.

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.

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.

Electrophysiological correlates of improved short-term memory for emotional faces.

Long-term memory (LTM) is enhanced for emotional information, but the influence of stimulus emotionality on short-term memory (STM) is less clear. We examined the electrophysiological correlates of improved visual STM for emotional face identity, focusing on the P1, N170, P3b and N250r event-related potential (ERP) components. These correlates are taken to indicate which memory processing stages and cognitive processes contribute to the improved STM for emotional face identity. In the encoding phase, one or three angry, happy or neutral faces were presented for 2s, resulting in a memory load of one or three. The subsequent 1-s retention phase was followed by a 2-s retrieval phase, in which participants indicated whether a probe face had been present or not during encoding. Memory performance was superior for angry and happy faces over neutral faces at load three. None of the ERP components during encoding were affected by facial expression. During retrieval, the early P3b was decreased for emotional compared to neutral faces, which presumably reflects greater resource allocation to the maintenance of the emotional faces. Furthermore, the N250r during retrieval was increased for emotional compared to neutral faces, reflecting an enhanced repetition effect for emotional faces. These findings suggest that enhanced visual STM for emotional faces arises from improved maintenance and from improved detection of face repetition at retrieval.

Enhanced visual short-term memory for angry faces.

Although some views of face perception posit independent processing of face identity and expression, recent studies suggest interactive processing of these 2 domains. The authors examined expression-identity interactions in visual short-term memory (VSTM) by assessing recognition performance in a VSTM task in which face identity was relevant and expression was irrelevant. Using study arrays of between 1 and 4 faces and a 1,000-ms retention interval, the authors measured recognition accuracy for just-seen faces. Results indicated that significantly more angry face identities can be stored in VSTM than happy or neutral face identities. Furthermore, the study provides evidence to exclude accounts for this angry face benefit based on physiological arousal, opportunity to encode, face discriminability, low-level feature recognition, expression intensity, or specific face sets. Perhaps processes activated by the presence of specifically angry expressions enhance VSTM because memory for the identities of angry people has particular behavioral relevance.

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).

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.

Familiarity enhances visual working memory for faces.

Although it is intuitive that familiarity with complex visual objects should aid their preservation in visual working memory (WM), empirical evidence for this is lacking. This study used a conventional change-detection procedure to assess visual WM for unfamiliar and famous faces in healthy adults. Across experiments, faces were upright or inverted and a low- or high-load concurrent verbal WM task was administered to suppress contribution from verbal WM. Even with a high verbal memory load, visual WM performance was significantly better and capacity estimated as significantly greater for famous versus unfamiliar faces. Face inversion abolished this effect. Thus, neither strategic, explicit support from verbal WM nor low-level feature processing easily accounts for the observed benefit of high familiarity for visual WM. These results demonstrate that storage of items in visual WM can be enhanced if robust visual representations of them already exist in long-term memory.

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

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

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.