Another avenue of my research concerns the influence of emotional
processing on the mediation of attention. A common finding in
tasks requring selective attention, such as the Stroop, is that negative emotional words tend to increase reaction
times to report the ink colour of words (McKenna & Sharma 2004), or
even to read the word itself (Algom, Chajut and Lev 2004).
Our model of emotional interference (Wyble, Bowman & Sharma, In Press) proposes that an
interplay
between so called cold-cognitive processes (exemplified by the Stroop
task) and
emotional salience is a
strategic form of adaptive attentional control that regulates the degree of focus on the current task in accord
with ongoing environmental demands.
This
circuit allows a
difficult task (such as an incongruent Stroop trial) to
momentarily request more attentional focus. Conversely, environmentally
salient information,
particularly of a threatening character, causes attentional focus
to temporarily withdraw from the current task in order to respond
rapidly to a potentially dangerous situation.
We embody this theory in a computational model that
explains the difference between Stroop interference
and emotional interference as competing drives on attentional control. The model
also illustrates how carryover effects from
difficult Stroop trials affects emotional processing on following trials, and vice versa.
Our model makes a number of predictions, one of which is that while
emotionally charged stimuli may impair performance on traditional
cognitive tasks (such as Stroop or Eriksen flanker tasks), other types
of tasks may benefit from the task disengagement.
Activation
of different parts of the model resembles imaging data from
anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal cortex in Stroop tasks, as
shown by Kerns et al (2004).
Thus, the model is constrained
by
biological as well as behavioral constraints.