Emotion perception and executive control interact in the salience network during emotionally charged working memory...

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Emotional Processing

Background:

• Emotional stimuli can impact cognitive functions like working memory (WM).
• The neural mechanisms behind how emotions affect WM remain unclear.
• Understanding this interaction is crucial for cognitive and affective neuroscience.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the neural basis of paradoxical effects of emotional stimuli on working memory.
• To examine how the salience network and emotion perception network interact during emotional WM tasks.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used.
• A novel emotional N-back task with fearful and neutral faces was implemented.
• Twenty-five healthy young adults participated.

Main Results:

• Behavioral: Impaired WM with fearful faces at 0-back, enhanced WM at 2-back.
• Neural: Differential activation in salience network (anterior insula, dorsal cingulate cortex) and emotion perception network (amygdala, temporal-occipital association cortex).
• Specific patterns: Dorsal AI and dACC showed increased activation for fearful faces at 0-back; dAI decreased, while TOC and amygdala increased at 2-back.

Conclusions:

• Findings support the dual competition model of emotion-cognition interaction.
• The salience network plays a key role in mediating executive control and emotion perception under varying task demands.
• Provides neural evidence for context-dependent effects of emotion on working memory.