The Neural Mechanisms Of Emotional Effects Of Visual Working Memory Capacity And Accuracy:Evidence From Behavioral And Nirs Techniques

Working memory refer to the temporary information processing and information system in the process of completing the cognitive task.It's capacity is limited.In essence,it is a limited attention control system and plays a very important role in the human advanced cognitive processing.Emotion is a subjective cognitive experience of objective things and a Psychological and physical state that combined with multiple senses,ideas and behaviors.Emotions always affect everyday cognitive tasks,and this effect is achieved by influencing the basic cognitive process of working memory.The existing research always focuses on that how emotional stimulation influence information encoding and storage of working memory.This influence reflected in the capacity of working memory.But the study of the interaction between emotional and working memory,the results are not consistent.Some studies suggest that emotional stimulation increases the capacity of working memory,while others suggest that emotional stimuli impair the capacity of working memory.Therefore,further experiments are needed to explore the interaction between emotion and working memory.More importantly,the accuracy of working memory can also reflect the process of working memory,information coding and storage,but very few studies explore that whether emotional state affect the accuracy of working memory.This study focuses on the interaction between emotional states and the capacity and precision of working memory.On the other hand,this study use the Near-infrared Spectroscopy(NIRS)technique to explore the neural mechanism of this interaction.In this study,the continuous reporting paradigm is used as the task of visual spatial working memory,and the task-independent emotional stimuli are presented before the task.The capacity and precision of the working memory of the visual space are measured.The results show that when the load of working memory is high,the capacity of working memory will be reduced under negative emotional condition,but the precision of the working memory is increased.This result shows that the reduction of WM capacity in negative affection states seems not to reflect a detrimental effect but a functional trade-off,and this trade-off only occurs when the memory load is high.On the other hand,negative emotions can enhance the activation of the brain prefrontal cortex.