About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 4. Cognitive Processes

Abstract

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Previous research suggests that the period of emerging adulthood is marked by heightened cognitive control due to prefrontal circuit maturation. However, cognitive control in this period may still be vulnerable to emotional interference arising from the asynchronous development of limbic regions, leading to suboptimal cognitive control in emotionally charged contexts. Cognitive flexibility, a component of cognitive control, allows shifting between goals or task sets. However, literature on emotion-cognition interactions suggests that the effect of emotion may depend on its valence: positive emotion could enhance flexibility by lowering the effort taken to process new information, while negative emotion could impair flexibility through strong goal-shielding (Goschke & Bolte, 2014).
The current study aimed to test the effect of emotional stimuli on cognitive flexibility assessed via behavioural performance and event-related potentials (ERPs). This study addresses the influence of emotional valence, its interaction with task relevance and the overall emotional context, which is relatively unexplored in existing literature. Participants (N = 68, 17-25 years, M = 18.5 years) completed a cued task-switching paradigm, wherein they had to switch between two non-emotional tasks (categorizing faces on the basis of age vs gender) in the task-irrelevant emotion block or switch between a non-emotional task and an emotional task (categorizing faces on the basis of age vs emotion expression) in the task-relevant emotional block. Emotional valence was manipulated as positive, negative, or neutral, with positive and negative faces occurring in separate blocks, creating a block-specific emotional context.
Data were analyzed using factorial ANOVA models, with an alpha level set at 0.05. Results from behavioural data revealed that responses were slower on switch trials with emotional targets than neutral targets. Responses elicited by both task-relevant happy and neutral targets on the emotion task were slower than on age task. Responses to negative faces were slower than neutral faces when emotion was task-irrelevant (on gender task), and faster than neutral faces when emotion was task-relevant (on emotion task). Furthermore, under a sad emotional context, neutral targets elicited faster and more accurate responses when emotion was task-irrelevant (on gender task) than task-relevant (on emotion task). However, accuracy was lower when switching from the non-emotional to the emotional task (under task-relevant emotion conditions), regardless of valence. The analyses of the stimulus- and cue-locked ERPs are still on-going, but our preliminary ERP analyses found longer N2 latency while switching to an emotional task, suggesting enhanced conflict while re-activating the emotional task set.
In conclusion, our findings indicate that task switching might be differentially modulated by the interaction between emotional valence and task relevance, potentially leading to a trade-off between speed and accuracy of switching. Given young adults' sensitivity to emotional cues, these cues may alter goal shielding and shifting control, though not consistently across all situations involving emotional targets or emotional contexts.

Author information

Author	Role
Vrushali Rao Gumnur, Department of Psychology, University of Alberta	Presenting author
Sandra A. Wiebe, Department of Psychology and NMHI, University of Alberta	Non-presenting author

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