The Modulation of Spatial Working Memory by Emotional Stickers and Facial Expressions

This article aims to investigate the interaction effects of emotional valence (negative, positive) and stimulus type (sticker, face) on attention allocation and information retrieval in spatial working memory (WM). The difference in recognition of emotional faces and stickers was also further explored. Using a high-resolution event-related potential (ERP) technique, a time-locked delayed matching-to-sample task (DMST) was employed that allowed separate investigations of target, delay, and probe phases. Twenty-two subjects participated in our experiment. The results indicated that negative face can catch early attention in information encoding, which was indicated by the augmentation of the attention-related P200 amplitude. In the delay phase, the N170 component represents facial specificity and showed a negative bias against stickers. For information retrieval, the increase in the emotion-related late positive component (LPC) showed that positive emotion could damage spatial WM and consume more cognitive resources. Moreover, stickers have the ability to catch an individual’s attention throughout the whole course of spatial WM with larger amplitudes of the attention-related P200, the negative slow wave (NSW), and the LPC. These findings highlight the role of stickers in different phases of spatial WM and provide new viewpoints for WM research on mental patients.