Spatiotemporal dynamics of working memory under the influence of emotions based on EEG

摘要

Objective. Previous studies have reported that working memory (WM) may be affected byemotions and that the effect may exist in different stages of WM. However, at present it remainscontroversial whether emotions inhibit or facilitate WM, and how the mechanism of dynamicinformation transmission in the brain during WM is affected by emotions. Approach. In this study,we used a video database to induce three emotions (negative, neutral, and positive) and adopted achange detection paradigm based on electroencephalography. Event-related potential (ERP)analysis, event-related spectral perturbation analysis, source location analysis based on the dipolelocalization method and the distributed source localization method, and effective connectivityanalysis were performed. Main results. Both behavioral and ERP results suggest that positiveemotions have no significant effect on WM capacity, while negative emotions could facilitate WMcapacity. Furthermore, the effective connectivity results based on two source location methodssuggest that the long-range connectivity between the frontal and posterior areas can reflect theinfluence of positive and negative emotions on the WM network, in which the connectivity underthe positive emotion condition occurs in the earlier period of WM maintenance, while theconnectivity under the negative emotion condition occurs in the later period of WM maintenance.Significance. The consistency of the behavioral, ERP, and effective connectivity results suggests thatunder the negative emotion condition, the top-down attention modulation between thefrontoparietal area and posterior area could promote the most relevant information storage duringWM maintenance.