The impact of visual working memory capacity on the filtering efficiency of emotional face distractors

In this paper, an event-related potential called contralateral delay activity (CDA) was applied to measure the filtering efficiency of happy, angry and neutral faces from visual working memory (VWM). The results showed that VWM capacity affected filtering of emotional faces during a VWM task. Individuals with high capacity were not distracted by emotional facial distractors. In contrast, the low-capacity group failed in filtering the neutral and angry face distractors, while the filtering was efficient for the happy face distractors. The results indicate that potentially threatening faces are particularly difficult to filter if VWM capacity is limited.

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Recommended citation: Ye, C., Xu, Q., Liu, Q., Cong, F., Saariluoma, P., Ristaniemi, T., & Astikainen, P. (2018). The impact of visual working memory capacity on the filtering efficiency of emotional face distractors. Biological Psychology, 138, 63-72.