Resisting emotional interference: brain regions facilitating working memory performance during negative distraction.

ABSTRACT: Survival-relevant information has privileged access to our awareness even during active cognitive engagement. Previous work has demonstrated that during working memory (WM) negative emotional distraction disrupts activation in the lateral prefrontal regions while also engaging the amygdala. Here, using slow event-related fMRI, we replicate and extend previous work examining the effect of negative emotional distraction on WM: (1) We demonstrate that prefrontal regions showed activation differences between correct and incorrect trials during negative, but not neutral, distraction. Specifically, frontopolar prefrontal cortex showed more deactivation for incorrect trials faced with negative distraction, whereas ventrolateral prefrontal regions showed less activation; (2) individual differences

SUBMITTER: Anticevic A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3856369 | biostudies-literature | 2010 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature