Alterations in working memory maintenance of fearful face distractors in depressed participants: An ERP study.

ABSTRACT: Task-irrelevant threatening faces (e.g., fearful) are difficult to filter from visual working memory (VWM), but the difficulty in filtering non-threatening negative faces (e.g., sad) is not known. Depressive symptoms could also potentially affect the ability to filter different emotional faces. We tested the filtering of task-irrelevant sad and fearful faces by depressed and control participants performing a color-change detection task. The VWM storage of distractors was indicated by contralateral delay activity, a specific event-related potential index for the number of objects stored in VWM during the maintenance phase. The control group did not store sad face distractors, but they automatically stored fearful face distractors, suggesting that threatening faces are specifically difficult

SUBMITTER: Ye C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9855285 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature