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The Emotional Stroop Task: Assessing Cognitive Performance under Exposure to Emotional Content
Published on: June 29, 2016
Attenuating age-related learning deficits: emotional valenced feedback interacts with task complexity
Marissa A Gorlick1, Gyslain Giguère, Brian D Glass
1Department of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712, USA.
Emotion (Washington, D.C.)
|November 21, 2012
Summary
Emotional feedback impacts older adults' learning. Positive feedback aids rule learning with low cognitive load, while negative feedback helps with high cognitive load, benefiting older adults.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive psychology
- Neuroscience of aging
- Human-Computer Interaction
Background:
- Older adults often exhibit enhanced processing of positive emotional stimuli.
- This positivity bias can reverse to a negativity bias under reduced cognitive control.
- Age-related deficits in rule learning are well-documented.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how emotional feedback influences age-related deficits in rule learning.
- To test if feedback valence (positive vs. negative) interacts with cognitive load to affect learning in older adults.
- To determine if emotional feedback can attenuate or amplify age-related learning impairments.
Main Methods:
- Experiment 1: Used emotional face feedback (happy/angry) under low and high cognitive load tasks.
- Experiment 2: Employed non-emotional point feedback (gain/loss) under varying cognitive loads.
- Measured rule learning and set-shifting performance in relation to age, feedback type, and task load.
Main Results:
- Emotional feedback interacted with age and cognitive load to affect learning.
- Low cognitive load: Positive feedback attenuated age-related deficits; negative feedback amplified them.
- High cognitive load: Negative feedback attenuated deficits; positive feedback amplified them.
- Non-emotional feedback did not show similar modulatory effects.
Conclusions:
- Emotional feedback can modulate age-related learning deficits.
- The effectiveness of emotional feedback depends on its valence and the cognitive demands of the task.
- Positive feedback benefits learning under low cognitive load, whereas negative feedback benefits learning under high cognitive load in older adults.
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