Emotions as Intrinsic Cognitive Load: An Eye Movement Analysis of High and Low Intelligent Individuals

摘要

Cognitive load is the measure of cognitive effort imposed by a task demand. Emotion is considered to be an extraneous variable to influence the overall cognitive load. In this study we try to embed the positive and negative emotions in the cognitive task itself to make it a part of intrinsic load. We assumed that the embedded emotional valence will interfere with the parallel cognitive processing and influence the cognitive load of individuals with high and low intelligence. Our eye movement and blink rate results suggest that negative emotion significantly increases the cognitive load of individuals with lesser intelligence but not of individuals with higher intelligence.