Filtering Mechanisms of Emotional Distractor Items in Visual Working Memory

It is unclear how people overcome the influence of distractor items with emotional information and keep attentional resources on target stimuli processing. Change detection task combined with systematic lateralization was adopted to investigate enhancement and suppression during encoding of emotional information into VWM separately.

The results showed that: (1) When distractors were presented horizontally, negative distractors induced significantly greater lateralized alpha activity in the parieto-occipital region compared to positive distractors. Conversely, for positive distractor items, alpha activity at the contralateral electrodes was significantly reduced compared to that at the ipsilateral electrodes. (2) With target items appearing horizontally, the presence of negative distractors led to a marked enhancement of theta activity in the frontal lobe region compared to positive distractors.