The cost of facing fear: Visual working memory is impaired for faces expressing fear.

Previous research has identified numerous factors affecting the capacity and accuracy of visual working memory (VWM). One potentially important factor is the emotionality of the stimuli to be encoded and held in VWM. We often must hold in VWM information that is emotionally charged, but much is still unknown about how the emotionality of stimuli impacts VWM performance. In the current research, we performed four studies examining the impact of fearful facial expressions on VWM for faces. Fearful expressions were found to produce a consistent cost to VWM performance. This cost was modulated by encoding time, but not set size. This cost was only present for faces in an upright orientation consistent with this cost being a product of the emotionality of the faces rather than lower-level perceptual differences between neutral and fearful faces. These findings are discussed in the context of existing theoretical accounts of the impact of emotion on information processing. We suggest that a number of competing effects drive both costs and benefits and are at play when emotional information must be stored in VWM, with the task context determining the balance between them.

The effect of distraction on face and voice recognition.

The results of two experiments are presented which explore the effect of distractor items on face and voice recognition. Following from the suggestion that voice processing is relatively weak compared to face processing, it was anticipated that voice recognition would be more affected by the presentation of distractor items between study and test compared to face recognition. Using a sequential matching task with a fixed interval between study and test that either incorporated distractor items or did not, the results supported our prediction. Face recognition remained strong irrespective of the number of distractor items between study and test. In contrast, voice recognition was significantly impaired by the presence of distractor items regardless of their number (Experiment 1). This pattern remained whether distractor items were highly similar to the targets or not (Experiment 2). These results offer support for the proposal that voice processing is a relatively vulnerable method of identification.