Working memory modulates the anger superiority effect in central and peripheral visual fields

ABSTRACT

Angry faces have been shown to be detected more efficiently in a crowd of distractors compared to happy faces, known as the anger superiority effect (ASE). The present study investigated whether the ASE could be modified by top-down manipulation of working memory (WM), in central and peripheral visual fields. In central vision, participants held a colour in WM for a final memory test while simultaneously performing a visual search task that required them to determine whether a face showed a different expression from other coloured faces. The colour held in WM matched either the colour of the target face (target-matching), the colour of a distractor face (distractor-matching), or neither (non-matching). Results showed that the ASE was observed when the probability of target-matching trials was low. However, when the top-down WM effect was strengthened by raising the probability of target-matching trials, the ASE in the target-matching condition was completely eliminated. Intriguingly, when the visual search task was substituted by a peripheral crowding task, similar results to central vision were found in the target-matching condition. Taken together, our findings indicate that the ASE is subject to the top-down WM effect, regardless of the visual field.

KEYWORDS:

• Anger superiority effect
• working memory
• peripheral visual field
• attention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China: [grant no 32000743]; Jiangxi Province Natural Science Foundation: [grant no 20212BAB215021]; Social Science Planning Project of Jiangxi Province: [grant no 21JY47].