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Updated: Oct 7, 2026
Brain Imaging Investigation of the Impairing Effect of Emotion on Cognition
Published on: February 1, 2012
Distractor processing of emotional faces: behavioral and women-only fMRI findings on the perceptual load-dilution
Özlem Ertan1,2, Zeynel Baran3, Metehan Çiçek2,4
1Department of Psychology, Ankara Medipol University, Ankara, Türkiye.
Introduction:
The perceptual load-dilution debate asks whether reduced distractor interference under demanding visual conditions reflects limited perceptual capacity or competition from additional neutral items. Because this debate has relied largely on neutral stimuli, it remains unclear whether the same mechanisms govern emotionally meaningful distraction. We examined this question using an all-faces visual search paradigm that separated cue-based attentional demand from display composition while minimizing target-distractor category confounds.
Methods:
In Experiment 1, 60 participants completed a face-discrimination task manipulating cue size, face size, target emotion (happy, angry), and distractor type (neutral, congruent, incongruent). In Experiment 2, 30 healthy right-handed women completed an fMRI-adapted version of the task during 3T scanning.
Results:
Behaviorally, distractor interference increased with cue size selectively for happy targets, yielding a reversed load effect, whereas face size did not alter interference. During scanning, congruency scores were not significantly modulated by cue size, face size, or target emotion. Neurally, incongruent trials increased activity across bilateral amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and frontal eye fields, and additionally engaged visual, parietal, subcortical, and motor regions. Cue size and face size showed different neural profiles, while emotion- and congruency-related responses depended on the broader task configuration. Left dorsolateral prefrontal congruency effects varied jointly with cue size and target emotion, whereas emotion-related responses in left anterior cingulate cortex and right amygdala depended on the cue-by-face configuration.
Discussion:
These findings do not support a dilution-specific amygdala mechanism. Instead, they indicate that cue-based attentional demand and display composition make different but interacting contributions to emotional distractor processing, and that neural sensitivity to distraction can remain evident when its behavioral expression is weak.
