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Trait anxiety is associated with deficits in attentional control, particularly in the ability to inhibit prepotent responses. Here, we investigated this effect while varying the level of cognitive load in a modified antisaccade task that employed emotional facial expressions (neutral, happy, and angry) as targets. Load was manipulated using a secondary auditory task requiring recognition of tones (low load), or recognition of specific tone pitch (high load). Results showed that load increased antisaccade latencies on trials where gaze toward face stimuli should be inhibited. This effect was exacerbated for high anxious individuals. Emotional expression also modulated task performance on antisaccade trials for both high and low anxious participants under low cognitive load, but did not influence performance under high load. Collectively, results (1) suggest that individuals reporting high levels of anxiety are particularly vulnerable to the effects of cognitive load on inhibition, and (2) support recent evidence that loading cognitive processes can reduce emotional influences on attention and cognition.

During the retention of visual information in working memory, event-related brain potentials show a sustained negativity over posterior visual regions contralateral to the side where memorised stimuli were presented. This contralateral delay activity (CDA) is generally believed to be a neural marker of working memory storage. In two experiments, we contrasted this storage account of the CDA with the alternative hypothesis that the CDA reflects the current focus of spatial attention on a subset of memorized items set up during the most recent encoding episode. We employed a sequential loading procedure where participants memorised four task-relevant items that were presented in two successive memory displays (M1 and M2). In both experiments, CDA components were initially elicited contralateral to task-relevant items in M1. Critically, the CDA switched polarity when M2 displays appeared on the opposite side. In line with the attentional activation account, these reversed CDA components exclusively reflected the number of items that were encoded from M2 displays, irrespective of how many M1 items were already held in working memory. On trials where M1 and M2 displays were presented on the same side, and on trials where M2 displays appeared non-laterally, CDA components elicited in the interval after M2 remained sensitive to a residual trace of M1 items, indicating that some activation of previously stored items was maintained across encoding episodes. These results challenge the hypothesis that CDA amplitudes directly reflect the total number of stored objects, and suggest that the CDA is primarily sensitive to the activation of a subset of working memory representations within the current focus of spatial attention.

Representations of known target features (attentional templates) guide attention towards target objects during visual search. Recent research has shown that templates for different target-defining attributes can be maintained simultaneously, but interactions between multiple templates have not yet been studied systematically. Here, we investigated the competition between long-term (sustained) and short-term (transient) search goals in tasks where participants searched for targets defined by one of two possible colors. One target color remained constant across blocks or runs of trials, while the other changed on every trial. Both colors were indicated at the start of each trial by cue displays. To assess the efficiency of target selection processes guided by sustained and transient color templates, RTs and N2pc components were measured in Experiment 1 for search displays that contained a target in the constant or variable color. Results revealed robust sustainedtemplate costs. RTs were slower and N2pc components emerged later and were smaller for sustained-color as compared to transient-color target objects. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that this cost emerged rapidly, within two trials after a new constant color template had been established. These findings suggest that the activation of a new topdown search goal impairs the ability of a pre-existing template in working memory to guide attention towards target objects, reflecting a new type of retroactive interference in the control of visual search. These findings also have implications for our understanding of interactions between short-term task goals and longer-term attentional biases associated with the affective or motivational valence of objects. (249/250 words)

There is extensive debate on the automaticity of attentional processing of emotional information. One core feature of automaticity is the independence of processing emotion from factors that can affect attention such as cognitive load. In the present study we investigated whether processing of emotional facial expressions was dependent on cognitive load using a visual search paradigm. Manual responses as well as eye-movements were recorded. While both measures showed that emotional information captured attention more strongly than neutral information, manual responses indicated that load slowed reaction times only for "pop-out" emotion conditions; no increase was seen for all-emotional displays. While this suggests that the saliency of emotion was reduced, eye movement data showed that effects were caused by improvements for allemotional displays in target processing efficiency. Additionally, trait anxiety did not influence threat processing, but costs were observed under load that were not present for non-anxious subjects. Our results suggest that while load can interfere with task performance, it may not affect emotion processing. Our findings highlight the importance of eye movement measures in accounting for differences in manual response data and provide novel support to theories of anxiety.

Testing a goaldriven account of involuntary attentional capture by threat Article (Accepted Version) http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Brown, Chris R H, Berggren, Nick and Forster, Sophie (2019) Testing a goal-driven account of involuntary attentional capture by threat. Emotion.

It is a widely observed finding that emotion and anxiety interact; highly stressed or anxious individuals show robust attentional biases towards external negative information. More generally, research has suggested that exposure to threatening stimuli, as well as the experience of acute stress, also may impair top-down attentional control and working memory. In the current study, we investigated how the influence of emotion and anxiety may interact to influence working memory performance. Participants were required to encode the orientation of four simple shapes, eight, or four shapes while filtering out four other irrelevant shapes from memory. Before memory displays, an irrelevant neutral or fearful face cue also was presented. Memory performance was found to interact with self-reported state anxiety and cue valence; on neutral cue trials, state anxiety was negatively correlated with performance. This effect was absent following a fear cue. In addition, filtering efficiency was negatively associated with state anxiety solely following a fear cue. Our findings suggest that state anxiety's influence to visual working memory can be strongly modulated by external signals to threat. Most crucially, rather than anxious individuals having greater difficulty rejecting external threatening information, we observed that external threat may in its own right generally impair filtering efficiency in anxious individuals.