Cognitive Advantages Of Proficient Chinese-English Bilinguals In Spatial Working Memory Under The Interference Of Negative Emotional Stimuli

Bilingual cognitive advantages are defined as the promotion effect of bilingual experience on executive function system.Spatial working memory is a short-term storage system with limited capacity,which is responsible for the storage and operation of visual spatial information.Negative emotional stimuli are often processed preferentially and automatically during cognitive processing,which can compete with spatial working memory in the same brain region dominated by the right hemisphere for limited working memory system resources,and thus affect the efficiency of individuals to complete spatial working memory tasks.In the current research,two researches were conducted to explore the cognitive advantage of proficient bilinguals in spatial working memory under the interference of negative emotional stimuli and the effect of tasks' difficulty on this cognitive advantage.The participants in the current research were proficient Chinese-English bilinguals and non-proficient Chinese-English bilinguals.Research 1 investigated whether proficient bilinguals had cognitive advantages in spatial working memory under the interference of negative emotional stimuli by emotional spatial 2-back task.A two-factor mixed experimental design of 2(participants type: proficient bilinguals vs.non-proficient bilinguals)×2(valence of distractors: negative emotion vs.neutral emotion)was couducted,participants type was between-subjects variable,valence of distractors was within-subjects variable,the dependent variables are the reaction times and accuracy of the task.The results of research 1 revealed that the accuracy of proficient bilinguals(77.56%)had no significant difference with that of non-proficient bilinguals(75%)in the condition of neutral condition,p=0.127;the accuracy of proficient bilinguals(75.11%)was significantly higher than that of non-proficient bilinguals(69.33%)under the interference of negative emotional stimuli,p=0.001.Research 2 changed tasks' difficulty from two aspects — storage ability and operation ability of working memory to explore the effect of tasks' difficulty on the cognitive advantages of proficient bilinguals in spatial working memory under the interference of negative emotional stimuli.Research 2 consisted of two studies named experiment 1 and experiment 2.Experiment 1 used the emotional spatial 2-back task with higher storage demonds than research 1 to explore the differences in performance between proficient bilinguals and non-proficient bilinguals under the interference of negative emotional stimuli.A two-factor mixed experimental design of2(participants type: proficient bilinguals vs.non-proficient bilinguals)×2(valence of distractors: negative emotion vs.neutral emotion)was couducted,participants type was between-subjects variable,valence of distractors was within-subjects variable,the dependent variables are the reaction times and accuracy of the task.The results of experiment 1 revealed that proficient bilinguals showed shorter reaction times(p=0.008)and higher accuracy(p=0.003)than that of than non-proficient bilinguals.Experiment 2 used the emotional delayed matching-to-sample task of different operation levels to explore the effect of different operation demonds on the cognitive advantages of proficient bilinguals in spatial working memory tasks under the interference of negative emotional stimuli.A 2(participants type: proficient bilinguals vs.non-proficient bilinguals)×2(valence of distractors: negative emotion vs.neutral emotion)×2(operation levels: low operation level vs.high operation level)mixed experimental design was conducted,participants type was between-subjects variable,valence of distractors and operation levels were within-subjects variable,the dependent variables are the reaction times and accuracy of the task.Results of experiment 2 revealed that there were no significant difference in reaction times(p=0.19)and accuracy(p=0.172)between proficient bilinguals and non-proficient bilinguals at the low level of operation;at the high level of operation,proficient bilinguals performed significantly better than non-proficient bilinguals in reaction times(p=0.032)and accuracy(p=0.001).Combined with the experimental results of the above two researches,the current research had the following conclusions:(1)Proficient Chinese-English bilinguals had the cognitive advantages in spatial working memory under the interference of negative emotional stimuli;(2)Under the interference of negative emotional stimuli,the cognitive advantages of proficient Chinese-English bilinguals in spatial working memory was affected by the tasks' difficulty,the bilingual cognitive advantages were more obvious in the task with higher difficulty.