Aversive distractors modulate affective working memory in frontoparietal regions

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Psychiatry

Background:

• Rumination and worry, common in psychiatric disorders, consume working memory (WM) resources.
• Negative information in WM impairs cognitive control and biases attention toward affective stimuli.
• Neural mechanisms of maintaining negative information and filtering aversive distractors in WM are understudied.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the neural mechanisms underlying the maintenance of affectively negative information in WM.
• To examine how aversive distractors interfere with cognitive control during WM tasks.
• To explore the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and posterior parietal cortex (PPC) in affective WM.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to monitor brain activity.
• Participants completed an affective verbal working memory task.
• Aversive and positive distractor cues were presented during the WM delay period.

Main Results:

• A decrease in dlPFC and PPC activity was observed during aversive distractors when negative information was held in WM.
• This pattern of reduced dlPFC and PPC activity correlated with behavioral performance.
• No such effect was found when maintaining positive words or during positive distractors.

Conclusions:

• The affective valence of WM content modulates top-down control networks.
• WM's affective content influences cognitive control over affective distractor interference.
• Findings provide a neurocognitive basis for understanding how rumination and worry impair cognitive control and emotion regulation.