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.

Selective attention prioritises relevant information amongst competing sensory input. Time-resolved electrophysiological studies have shown stronger representation of attended compared to unattended stimuli, which has been interpreted as an effect of attention on information coding. However, because attention is often manipulated by making only the attended stimulus a target to be remembered and/or responded to, many reported attention effects have been confounded with target-related processes such as visual short-term memory or decision-making. In addition, attention effects could be influenced by temporal expectation about when something is likely to happen. The aim of this study was to investigate the dynamic effect of attention on visual processing using multivariate pattern analysis of electroencephalography (EEG) data, while (1) controlling for target-related confounds, and (2) directly investigating the influence of temporal expectation. Participants viewed rapid sequences of overlaid oriented grating pairs while detecting a “target” grating of a particular orientation. We manipulated attention, one grating was attended and the other ignored (cued by colour), and temporal expectation, with stimulus onset timing either predictable or not. We controlled for target-related processing confounds by only analysing non-target trials. Both attended and ignored gratings were initially coded equally in the pattern of responses across EEG sensors. An effect of attention, with preferential coding of the attended stimulus, emerged approximately 230 ms after stimulus onset. This attention effect occurred even when controlling for target-related processing confounds, and regardless of stimulus onset expectation. These results provide insight into the effect of feature-based attention on the dynamic processing of competing visual information.

Radiologists make critical decisions based on searching and interpreting medical images. The probability of a lung nodule differs across anatomical regions within the chest, raising the possibility that radiologists might have a prior expectation that creates an attentional bias. The development of expertise is also thought to cause “tuning” to relevant features, allowing radiologists to become faster and more accurate at detecting potential masses within their domain of expertise. Here, we tested both radiologists and control participants with a novel attentional-cueing paradigm to investigate whether the deployment of attention was affected (1) by a context that might invoke prior knowledge for experts, (2) by a nodule localized either on the same or on opposite sides as a subsequent target, and (3) by inversion of the nodule-present chest radiographs, to assess the orientation specificity of any effects. The participants also performed a nodule detection task to verify that our presentation duration was sufficient to extract diagnostic information. We saw no evidence of priors triggered by a normal chest radiograph cue affecting attention. When the cue was an upright abnormal chest radiograph, radiologists were faster when the lateralised nodule and the subsequent target appeared at the same rather than at opposite locations, suggesting attention was captured by the nodule. The opposite pattern was present for inverted images. We saw no evidence of cueing for control participants in any condition, which suggests that radiologists are indeed more sensitive to visual features that are not perceived as salient by naïve observers. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.3758/s13414-019-01695-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Holistic processing, demonstrated by a failure of selective attention to individual parts within stimuli, is often considered a relatively unique feature of the processing of faces and objects of expertise. However, face-like holistic processing has been recently demonstrated for novel line stimuli with salient Gestalt perceptual grouping cues. Further, disrupting such cues within face stimuli disrupts holistic face perception. There is evidence that holistic processing of these gestalt stimuli and faces does not overlap mechanistically in the same way as does the processing of faces and objects of expertise. However, the relationship between these different manifestations of holistic processing is unclear. We developed a task to probe whether a holistic processing-specific overlap occurs at an earlier, perceptual level between the mechanisms supporting processing of faces and strong gestalt stimuli. Faces and gestalt line stimuli were overlaid, and participants made part judgments about either the faces (Experiment 1) or line stimuli (Experiment 2) in a composite task indexing holistic perception. The data revealed evidence of reciprocal interference between holistic processing of line and face stimuli, with indices of holistic processing of face and line stimuli reduced when the overlaid stimuli were also processed holistically (e.g., intact line/face stimuli) compared with when the overlaid stimuli did not commandeer holistic processing resources (e.g., misaligned line/face stimuli). This pattern is consistent with a mechanistic overlap between the holistic perception of faces and gestalt stimuli. Our results support a dual-stimulusbased and experienced-based-pathway model of holistic processing, with face stimuli using both.