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Research Articles

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

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Pages 271-283 | Received 18 Jun 2022, Accepted 19 Dec 2022, Published online: 24 Dec 2022
 

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.

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].

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