A Study For The Influence On Working Memory Capacity From Emotional Conditions

Emotion is closely related to our work and life.In recent years,more and more evidence has indicated that emotion could impact extensively and deeply on cognitive processes.However,as a key component in cognitive system,working memory's working mechanism under emotional condition has not been elucidated.Thus,the study for the influence on working memory capacity from emotional conditions not only is an important content of cognitive neuroscience,but also can provide theoretical and methodological basis for ergonomic design of human-machine interaction systems under the emotional state.The study adopted event-related potential(ERP)technology,established a video database by selecting the effective Chinese emotional videos to induce positive,negative,neutral emotion,and designed the experiment using change detection paradigm to explore the impact of emotion on visual working memory capacity.Behavioral results found that the interaction effect between emotion and working memory capacity was observed after subjects were divided into two groups respectively with high and low working memory capacity.Using the neutral emotion stimulus as the control condition,we found that the working memory capacity of the high-capacity group increased in both the positive and negative emotion condition;on the contrary,there was a decline of working memory capacity in the low-capacity group in the positive and negative emotion condition.Through analysis on contralateral delay activity(CDA)component of different groups,we found that the CDA amplitude of the high-capacity group went higher and the one of the low-capacity group went lower in both positive and negative emotion condition than in the neutral one.P300 component analysis found that working memory capacity was suppressed under both positive and negative emotion condition,but there were no significant differences at P300 amplitude between subjects.According to the attention resource theory,the above results indicate that the emotional impact on working memory capacity has significant differences among subjects;that is,the high-capacity group promoted working memory capacity in the positive and negative emotions condition,while low-capacity group showed decreased working memory capacity in the positive,negative emotion condition.