Negative emotional state modulates visual working memory in the late consolidation phase

ABSTRACT

Although a considerable literature has grown up around the interactions between emotional state and visual working memory (VWM) performance, the mechanism underlying the impact of the negative emotional state on VWM remains unclear. The present study aimed to test whether the influence of emotional state is related to the early phase or late phase of VWM consolidation process. Across three experiments, we found that the negative emotional state did not affect VWM performance when the presentation time of stimuli was short. However, when the presentation time was long, the negative emotional state increased the VWM precision and reduced the VWM number. According to the two-phase model proposed by Ye et al. (2017. A two-phase model of resource allocation in visual working memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 43(10), 1557–1566. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000376), the results suggested that negative emotional state could affect the late phase of resource allocation in VWM consolidation process, but it has no impact on the early consolidation phase. The findings from this study make important contributions to the current literature regarding the emotional modulation of VWM.

KEYWORDS:

• Negative emotional state
• visual working memory
• resource allocation
• two-phase model
• late consolidation phase

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr. Weizhen Xie and Ms. Qianru Xu for the helpful discussions. We also want to thank Dr. Tengfei Liang and Ms. Xiaoyu Chen for their valuable contribution to the data acquisition. Finally, we also want to thank two anonymous reviewers for providing constructive feedback in the review process. Author contributions statement: F. L., Q. L., and C. Y. conceived and designed the experiments. F. L., performed the data acquisition and analysed the data. Q. L., C. Y., and F. L. interpreted the data. C. Y., F. L., and Q. L. drafted the manuscript. All authors revised and approved the manuscript.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author ([email protected], Qiang Liu) on reasonable request.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 A discrete slot-based theory (Balaban et al., 2019; Luck & Vogel, 1997; Vogel et al., 2001; Zhang & Luck, 2008) and a continuous resource theory (Bays et al., 2009; Bays & Husain, 2008; Bays et al., 2011; Wilken & Ma, 2004) have been proposed for the nature of mental commodity that supports VWM storage. The term resources used in our paper is actually a neutral term. This term has the same meaning as the term mental commodity in Suchow et al. (2014)’ s study. It can either refer to the “slots” based on the framework of the discrete slot-based theory, or refer to the “continuous resources” based on the framework of the continuous resource theory. In our paper, the term resources is only used to improve the coherence, but it does not mean that we prefer one of these two theories.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC 31970989 to Qiang Liu, and NSFC 31700948 to Chaoxiong Ye), and the Academy of Finland (decision number: 333649 to Chaoxiong Ye). All the authors had full independence from the funding sources.