The role of ambiguous valence, origin, and activation in behavioral and eye-tracking measurements during N-back task

This study investigates how emotionally ambiguous words can influence performance in the N-back task. In two experiments, we measured differences in behavior (performance accuracy and reaction times) and management of visual attention (eye-tracking measurement: number of fixations, mean duration of fixation) for ambiguous and unambiguous words. We hypothesized that words ambiguous on one of three emotional spaces - valence (positivity and negativity), origin (automaticity and reflectiveness), and activation (arousal and subjective significance) - would increase accuracy in the N-back task (Experiment 1), but also elicit more and longer fixations (Experiment 2) compared to the unidimensional, unambiguous words. The behavioral hypotheses were confirmed for words of ambiguous valence and origin, but not for activation ambiguity. Furthermore, all eye-tracking hypotheses were confirmed, finding differences between control words and all ambiguous groups of words. Our findings further show that ambiguity may be found in emotional spaces other than valence (i.e., origin), which may significantly influence our cognitive functioning.