The underlying neural mechanism in attentional control during encoding of emotional stimuli
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1
University of Queensland, Psychology, Australia
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2
Uppsala University, Psychology, Sweden
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3
Stockholm University, Psychology, Sweden
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4
Karolinska institute and stockholm University, Aging Research Center, Sweden
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5
Umeå Center for Functional Brain Imaging (UFBI), Sweden
Background: The ability of goal directed attention underlies most cognitive processes. Understanding the neural mechanism related to such process is of great interests for understanding the normal and abnormal emotional functions. However, the brain process involved in filtering out the irrelevant emotional information is still largely unknown. This study aimed to investigate neural and behavioral underpinnings of attending to task relevant emotional stimuli while ignoring irrelevant emotional stimuli during working memory (WM) encoding.
Method: Sixteen university students (18-25 years old) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while performing the WM task. The task included instructions to attend to emotional pictures while ignoring either the emotional or neutral pictures during the encoding phase. The task consisted of 5 conditions; (1) attend positive/ignore negative, (2) attend positive/ignore neutral, (3) attend negative/ignore positive, (4) attend negative/ignore neutral, and (5) passive viewing. Participants’ memory performance during recognition memory outside the scanner was also tested.
Results: The results showed increased memory performance for instructed attention to emotional targets compare to the passive viewing condition. FMRI results demonstrated the engagement of attentional network for processing the emotional targets during the guided attention including the medial and lateral prefrontal cortex, fusiform gyrus, insula, and parahippocampal gyrus. Interestingly, striatal regions were involved when participants were instructed to ignore emotional distracters compared to neutral distracters. Activation of subsets of these top-down attentional regions was correlated with the behavioral performance during working memory and recognition memory indicating that these regions are involved in performing the task at an optimal level
Discussion: This study provides novel insights into the neural consequence of guided attention during encoding of emotional information. As such, these findings are of potential relevance to cognitive, social and other neuroscientists interested in the neural mechanisms of cognition – emotion interactions.
Keywords:
working memory,
Emotional Distraction,
interference control,
selective attention,
fronto-parietal attention network
Conference:
ACNS-2013 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference, Clayton, Melbourne, Australia, 28 Nov - 1 Dec, 2013.
Presentation Type:
Poster
Topic:
Emotion and Social
Citation:
Ziaei
M,
Peira
N and
Persson
J
(2013). The underlying neural mechanism in attentional control during encoding of emotional stimuli.
Conference Abstract:
ACNS-2013 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2013.212.00071
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Received:
15 Oct 2013;
Published Online:
25 Nov 2013.
*
Correspondence:
Mrs. Maryam Ziaei, University of Queensland, Psychology, Brisbane, Australia, maryam.ziaei@cai.uq.edu.au