Cognition and emotion are intricately intertwined, because individuals orient toward, perceive, and interpret external stimuli in the context of their motivational and behavioral significance. Information associated with danger, for example, may be especially likely to capture or engage attention. Behavioral studies have confirmed that people are slower to shift attention away from words with emotional significance (e.g., Stormark, Nordby, & Hugdahl, 1995), supporting the notion that emotional factors may have an important influence on the deployment and operation of attention. How emotional factors modulate activity in brain regions involved in attention is thus an important question. To address this issue, in the present investigation, we examined the impact of emotional salience on activity in neural systems of attention by examining the influence of emotional and nonemotional distractors on brain activation.One viewpoint regarding the relationship between emotion and cognition holds that reciprocal brain regions are involved in emotional versus cognitive tasks. For example, Drevets and Raichle (1998) found, across a wide range of PET studies, that a constellation of regions, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), was consistently more active during cognitive tasks but was less active during tasks with an emotional component. A complementary constellation of regions, including the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), the ventral ACC, and the amygdala, was more active for emotional tasks and less active for nonemotional tasks. The authors interpreted these findings as supporting a reciprocity, or tradeoff, between cognition and emotion, such that as activity increases in cognitive regions, it decreases in emotional regions and vice versa.Although the reciprocity conception of cognition and emotion may be a useful heuristic for conceptualizing In this research, we investigated the degree to which brain systems involved in ignoring emotionally salient information differ from those involved in ignoring nonemotional information. The design allowed examination of regional brain activity, using fMRI during color-word and emotional Stroop tasks. Twelve participants indicated the color of words while ignoring word meaning in conditions in which neutral words were contrasted to emotionally negative, emotionally positive, and incongruent color words. Dorsolateral frontal lobe activity was increased by both negative and incongruent color words, indicating a common system for maintaining an attentional set in the presence of salient distractors. In posterior regions of the brain, activity depended on the nature of the information to be ignored. Ignoring color-incongruent words increased left parietal activity and decreased parahippocampal gyrus activity, whereas ignoring negative emotional words increased bilateral occipito-temporal activityand decreasedamygdala activity. The results indicate that emotion and attention are intimately related via a network of regions tha...

This review addresses the interconnections between emotional and attentional processing, with an emphasis on both behavioral and neuroscientific findings. Are emotional stimuli encoded automatically, and what does that mean? How are emotional stimuli selected for enhanced processing within a limited capacity system? Evidence suggests a two-stage process: First, emotional significance is evaluated preattentively by a sub-cortical circuit involving the amygdala; and second, stimuli deemed emotionally significant are given priority in the competition for access to selective attention. This process involves bottom-up inputs from the amygdala as well as top-down influences from frontal lobe regions involved in goal setting and maintaining representations in working memory. The review highlights limitations in the current literature, directions for fruitful future research, and the need to move beyond simple dichotomies such as 'cognition' versus 'emotion.'

Error commission evokes changes in event-related potentials, autonomic nervous system activity, and behavior, presumably reflecting the operation of a cognitive control network. Here we test the hypothesis that errors lead to increased cortical arousal, measurable as changes in electroencephalogram (EEG) alpha band power. Participants performed a Stroop task while EEG was recorded. Following correct responses, alpha power increased and then decreased in a quadratic pattern, implying transient mental disengagement during the intertrial interval. This trend was absent following errors, which elicited significantly less alpha power than correct trials. Moreover, post-error alpha power was a better predictor of individual differences in post-error slowing than the error-related negativity (ERN), whereas the ERN was a better predictor of post-error accuracy than alpha power. These findings imply that changes in cortical arousal play a unique role in modulating post-error behavior.

What is your brain doing while your mind is wandering? This study used a within-subjects experience-sampling design to test whether episodes of mind-wandering during a demanding cognitive task are associated with increases in EEG alpha power. Alpha refers to cyclic oscillations in EEG activity at 8-12 Hz, and has been previously correlated with internally rather than externally directed cognition. Participants completed a speeded performance task with more than 800 trials while EEG was recorded. Intermittent experience-sampling probes asked participants to indicate whether their mind was wandering or on-task. Participants reported mind-wandering in response to approximately half of the probes. EEG alpha power was significantly higher preceding probes to which participants reported mind-wandering, compared with probes to which participants reported being on task. These findings imply that dynamic changes in alpha power may prove a valuable tool in studying momentary fluctuations in mind-wandering.

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