The influence of emotional scenes and attentional bias on visual working memory: Insights from a 3-back task

The present study investigated the effects of emotional valence-specifically, negative, positive, and neutral affective content-on visual working memory performance under conditions of sustained cognitive demand. Participants (N = 127), all university students from Saudi Arabia, completed a culturally adapted version of the 3-back task in which images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) were categorized by emotional valence and presented in homogeneous blocks. The primary aim was to examine whether emotional content modulates core aspects of working memory, including accuracy, reaction time, perceptual sensitivity (d'), and decision bias (criterion c), particularly when continuous updating is required. Results indicated a significant advantage for negative stimuli in terms of accuracy, with participants demonstrating higher performance in this condition relative to both neutral and positive blocks. Conversely, reaction times were fastest in the positive condition, though no evidence of a speed-accuracy trade-off was observed. Sensitivity, as indexed by d', remained statistically equivalent across conditions; however, criterion c analyses revealed a more conservative response tendency in the positive condition. Age was negatively correlated with accuracy in the negative condition, suggesting early-emerging shifts in emotion-cognition dynamics. These findings are discussed in relation to cultural context and signal detection theory, with implications for models of affective modulation in visual working memory.