The influence of peripheral emotions on visuospatial working memory performance

Abstract

Emotional faces carry important social values and impact how we respond to the environment. Negative, threat-related emotional faces, particularly fear, are proposed to automatically attract and hold attention through a fast subcortical “low road”, distinct from a slower “high road”. This “low road” is suggested to be an evolutionary adaptive pathway that is essential for survival in response to threat in the environment. Understanding how this emotion-driven phenomenon can impact our higher cognition, such as visuospatial working memory (VSWM), is crucial to deconstruct the underlying mechanisms of how emotions are processed under varying conditions and how they affect our behavior. In the present eye-tracking experiment, we investigate how fearful vs. neutral emotional faces in our peripheral vision could affect VSWM performance in a modified dot location memory-guided saccade task. We also manipulate the spatial location of emotional face in relation to the target dot. Results of the experiment illustrate, as hypothesized, a decrease in VSWM precision when fearful faces, compared to neutral faces, are presented in the peripheral visual field. We provide evidence supporting the existence of a “low road” through which our attentional resources are diverted by fearful faces in the periphery, thereby hindering VSWM performance. Our results also reveal the context-dependent nature of this effect because the effect is only observed when the emotional stimulus is positioned spatially distant from the target dot in our peripheral vision.