THE INFLUENCE OF SUBOPTIMAL AFFECTIVE STIMULI ON WORKING MEMORY

The aim of the studies was to assess the possibility and consequences of marking elements stored in working memory by affective stimuli. Two experiments in the memory search paradigm were conducted. In both studies one of the elements was suboptimally visually primed either by affective or neutral stimulus. It was hypothesized that such manipulation would result in higher activation of the primed element. The activation should result in higher accuracy in affective vs. neutral priming condition. The obtained results showed that the affective priming influenced task performance. Nevertheless, depending on a neutral stimulus type (mask vs. neutral face), the performance accuracy increased or decreased. The results of the studies suggest that such an effect could depend on the automatic activation of primed stimuli representation, and also on the conscious focusing of attention on the important, from evolutionary perspective, affective stimulus. Such focusing could impair memory search task performance.