The effect of cognitive load on interaction pattern of emotion and working memory: An ERP study

Emotion might selectively affect spatial and verbal cognitive activities and the selective interaction patter could be modulated by cognitive load. To test the hypotheses, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) technique to investigate the interaction pattern of emotion and working memory (WM) by typical WM n-back tasks with low and high cognitive loads. In the 0-back task, late ERP components for both spatial and verbal WM were affected by induced emotional states consistently. However, in the 2-back task, we could clearly observe that induced emotional states selectively affected ERPs for spatial WM, but not for verbal WM. These results suggested that the interactive pattern of emotion and WM was modulated by cognitive load. In the condition of low cognitive load, interaction of emotion and WM was similar and nonspecific. However, with the increasing of cognitive load, interaction of emotion and WM became specific and selective. ERP results suggested that attention resource competition could be the underlying neutral mechanism of the selective interactive pattern between emotion and WM.