Emotion-laden stimuli can disturb information processing in an unrelated cognitive task. We investigated the possibilities and limitations for shielding from such disturbance. Participants performed a simple categorization task while being simultaneously exposed to negative, neutral, and positive pictures. Performance dropped with negative pictures, relative to positive and neutral stimuli. Unlike Stroop or Simon interference effects, this negativity-based disturbance did not reduce as a function of previous experience of disturbance (Exp. 1) or of announcement of such disturbance on a trial-by-trial basis (Exps. 2 and 3). We found hints of a reduction of negativity-based disturbance, however, when negative stimulation occurred with high list-wide probability (Exp. 4). These observations suggest that the control of negativity-based task disturbance might be possible in a sustained manner, but that it is severely limited when operating in a transient, moment-to-moment manner.

The cognitive system adapts to disturbances caused by task-irrelevant information. For example, interference due to irrelevant spatial stimulation (e.g., the spatial Simon effect) typically diminishes right after a spatially incongruent event. These adaptation effects reflect processes that help to overcome the impact of task-irrelevant information. Interference with (or interruption of) task processing can also result from valent (i.e., positive or negative) stimuli, such as in the "affective Simon" task. In the present study, we tested whether the resolution of valence-based task disturbances generalizes to the resolution of other cognitive (spatial) types of interference, and vice versa. Experiments 1 and 2 explored the interplay of adaptation effects triggered by spatial and affective interference. Incongruent spatial information modified the spatial Simon effect but not affective interference effects, whereas incongruent affective information modified affective interference effects to some extent, but not spatial Simon effects. In Experiment 3, we investigated the interplay of adaptation effects triggered by spatial interference and by the interruption of task processing from valent information that did not overlap with the main task ("emotional Stroop" effect). Again we observed domain-specific adaptation for the spatial Simon effect but found no evidence for cross-domain modulations. We assume that the processes used to resolve task disturbance from irrelevant affective and spatial information operate in largely independent manners.

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