Emotional content of stimuli improves visuospatial working memory.

Processing and storage in visuospatial working memory (VSWM) seem to depend on attention-based mechanisms. In order to explore the effect of attention-attractive stimuli, such as emotional faces on VSWM performance, ERPs were obtained from 20 young adults while reproducing spatial sequences of six facial (happy and neutral) and non-facial control stimuli in inverse order. Behavioral performances revealed that trials with happy facial expressions resulted in a significantly higher amount of correct responses.

Visual processing in a facial emotional context: an ERP study.

Facial emotional processing can be bypassed when faces are task-irrelevant and attention is diverted, although this effect has not been examined when cognitive task occurs within a facial background. Event-related potential (ERP) measures were obtained to evaluate the influence of different irrelevant facial emotional contexts on a simultaneous "ear-size" detection task performance in five processing contexts: (1) neutral face, (2) happy face, (3) fearful face, (4) facial contour, and (5) non-facial context. Reaction times were longer when visual processing occurred in a facial context, regardless of its emotional content.