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Vol.21, No.3, 151 ~ 165, 2018
Title
Effects of Emotional Information on Visual Perception and Working Memory in Biological Motion
 
Abstract
The appropriate interpretation of social cues is a crucial ability for everyday life. While processing socially relevant information, beyond the low-level physical features of the stimuli to emotional information is known to influence human cognition in various stages, from early perception to later high-level cognition, such as working memory (WM). However, it remains unclear how the influence of each type of emotional information on cognitive processes changes in response to what has occurred in the processing stage. Past studies have largely adopted face stimuli to address this type of research question, but we used a unique class of socially relevant motion stimuli, called biological motion (BM), which depicts various human actions and emotions with moving dots to exhibit the effects of anger, happiness, and neutral emotion on task performance in perceptual and working memory. In this study, participants determined whether two BM stimuli, sequentially presented with a delay between them (WM task) or one immediately after the other (perceptual task), were identical. The perceptual task showed that discrimination accuracies for emotional stimuli (i.e., angry and happy) were lower than those for neutral stimuli, implying that emotional information has a negative impact on early perceptual processes. Alternatively, the results of the WM task showed that the accuracy drop as the interstimulus interval increased was actually lower in emotional BM conditions than in the neutral condition, which suggests that emotional information benefited maintenance. Moreover, anger and happiness had distinct impacts on the performance of perception and WM. Our findings have significance as we provide evidence for the interaction of type of emotion and information-processing stage.
Key Words
생물형운동, 정서, 지각, 사회적 정보, 작업기억, Biological Motion, Emotion, Perception, Social Information, Working Memory
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