Poncet, Marlene and Spotorno, Sara and Jackson, Margaret (2024) Competition between emotional faces in visuo-spatial working memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. DOI https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001330
Poncet, Marlene and Spotorno, Sara and Jackson, Margaret (2024) Competition between emotional faces in visuo-spatial working memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. DOI https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001330
Poncet, Marlene and Spotorno, Sara and Jackson, Margaret (2024) Competition between emotional faces in visuo-spatial working memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. DOI https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001330
Abstract
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 cooccurring 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.
Item Type: | Article |
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Uncontrolled Keywords: | face perception, visuospatial working memory, emotion, eye movements |
Divisions: | Faculty of Science and Health Faculty of Science and Health > Psychology, Department of |
SWORD Depositor: | Unnamed user with email elements@essex.ac.uk |
Depositing User: | Unnamed user with email elements@essex.ac.uk |
Date Deposited: | 01 Oct 2024 15:13 |
Last Modified: | 30 Oct 2024 21:32 |
URI: | http://repository.essex.ac.uk/id/eprint/37938 |
Available files
Filename: 2024-58771-001.pdf
Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0