Emotional pictures impact on cognitive tasks solving

In this research we studied an emotional impact on the cognitive processes with event relation potentials method. This research was important because of a constant increase in information which had to be known for the human being of the time. Furthermore, the speed of modern life led to the necessity of some problem solution at the same time and to the reaction to two and more than two information streams simultaneously. The investigation of interconnection and interaction of cognitive and emotional processes was also important for neuroeconomy that studied a neurophysiologic basis of decision making which told that every decision was made by emotional and cognitive brain system. In our experiment 58 subjects participated. 30 positive, 30 negative and 30 neutral (control) emotional stimuli were presented randomly at the center of a dark screen for 58 subjects. Cognitive tasks were presented simultaneously. For memory research we used information extraction from long-term memory tasks; for thinking research there was used homonyms method. EEG was recoded form 33 subjects monopolar from 19 sites according to «10-20%» international system. In ERP analysis the epoch was 1000 mc, which included 200 mc before stimulus presentation for base line correction. In our research we found that the results of thinking task decision depended on emotion valency as distinct from memory task solving. By ERP method it was shown that emotional pictures had an influence on different stages of information processing and this impact depended on the task type. Positive valency pictures P400-800 component was increased by positive valency pictures during memory tasks solving and decreased during thinking task solving. N400-7000 component was increased by negative pictures during memory task. In thinking tasks solving the same impact was found for positive pictures.

Keywords

Authors

References