The influence of bilingual experience on executive function under emotional interference: Evidence from the N1 component

The influence of bilingual education and experience on an individual’s information-processing ability has recently been a hot issue in international studies. Previous studies have found that bilingual experience affects executive function, but the results remain controversial. Executive function refers to the conscious control of purposeful behavior. It is responsible for processing high-level action controls, including such sub-functions as inhibitory control, cognitive switching, and working memory updating. Emotion, as an essential factor in daily life, also has a complex interaction with executive function. This paper explores whether the bilingual cognitive advantage effect can continue in the more complex conditions of emotional interference. To investigate the specific electrophysiological characteristics of the participants at different stages of cognitive processing, we used a combination of the behavioral and ERP experiments in which the positive, neutral, and negative emotional stimuli were selected as emotional interference conditions and the emotional Simon paradigm, the cognitive switching of emotion paradigm, and the emotional N-back paradigm was adopted. The results show that the main effect of the N1 component amplitude is significant. Specifically, the amplitude of the N1 component in the proficient bilinguals is significantly smaller than that of the non-proficient bilinguals, while the main effects of other component groups are not significant, indicating that under the condition of emotional interference, the influence of bilingual experience on executive function only exists in the early attention stage and that the bilingual experience can improve the individual’s attentional control and speed up attention processing in the early attention stage.