Cognitive load modulates the effects of social contexts on facial expression processing

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Social Psychology
• Affective Science

Background:

• Emotion perception is crucial for social interaction.
• Contextual faces influence facial expression recognition via congruence and functional relations.
• The impact of cognitive load on these contextual effects is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how cognitive load modulates congruence and functional-relational effects in facial expression processing.
• To explore the temporal dynamics of these modulations using event-related potentials (ERPs).

Main Methods:

• Participants performed a facial expression recognition task with varying cognitive load.
• A central target face was presented with a peripheral, dynamically expressing, and gazing contextual face.
• Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to analyze neural processing.

Main Results:

• Behaviorally, fearful faces were recognized faster under low cognitive load compared to high cognitive load.
• ERPs revealed that cognitive load modulated both early and late stages of facial processing.
• Under low cognitive load, functional-relational effects were observed for fearful target faces; under high cognitive load, congruence effects dominated.

Conclusions:

• Cognitive load significantly modulates how contextual faces influence facial expression perception.
• These modulations, particularly the shift between functional-relational and congruence effects, occur during late-stage neural processing.