Filtering Mechanisms of Emotional Distractor Items in Visual Working Memory

Interference suppression is a method to optimize the limited capacity of visual working memory (VWM). It is unclear how people overcome the influence of distractor items with emotional information and keep attentional resources on target stimuli processing. Change detection task combined with systematic lateralization was adopted to investigate enhancement and suppression during encoding of emotional information into VWM separately. The results showed that: (1) When distractors were presented horizontally, negative distractors induced significantly greater lateralized alpha activity in the parieto-occipital region compared to positive distractors. Conversely, for positive distractor items, alpha activity at the contralateral electrodes was significantly reduced compared to that at the ipsilateral electrodes. (2) With target items appearing horizontally, the presence of negative distractors led to a marked enhancement of theta activity in the frontal lobe region compared to positive distractors. Additionally, under the negative distractor condition, stronger theta activity was observed at the contralateral electrodes compared to the ipsilateral electrodes to target items. Furthermore, alpha activity at the contralateral electrodes was significantly weaker than at the ipsilateral electrodes when the target item was presented. (3) Compared to positive distractor items, negative distractor items elicited significantly greater lateralized theta activity in the parieto-occipital region. All above suggested that individuals possess the capability to directly suppress negative emotional distractors, facilitating the effective capture of goals. Conversely, the capability would be diminished by positive distractors to inhibit suppression, thereby impeding the processing of targeted items.