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The Impact of Cognitive Load on Emotional Semantic Priming: Behavioral and Neural Evidence
Poster Session C, Saturday, September 13, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Lucia Z-Rivera1, Ebtesam Sajjadi1, Muhammad Fusenig1, Ibrahim Sartaj1, Yi Wei1, Yukta Thyagaraj 1; 1University of Marylan
In everyday situations such as multitasking or navigating stressful environments, individuals often process emotional information under cognitive load. Prior research suggests that semantic priming, particularly affective priming, relies on available cognitive resources to facilitate emotional word recognition. However, it remains unclear how increased cognitive demands impact this process and what the possible effects are on hemispheric lateralization. The current study investigates whether high cognitive load disrupts emotional semantic priming, using reaction time and N400 amplitude as primary outcome measures. We will use a dual-task paradigm combining a lexical decision task (LDT) with varying levels of cognitive load. Participants will complete a lexical decision task involving face-word prime-target pairs. Each trial begins with a character string to be memorized (either low or high cognitive load), followed by a prime-target sequence. Prime stimuli consist of facial expressions taken from a validated database, and target stimuli include both real English words and pseudowords. The prime-target pairs vary in emotional congruency, with conditions that are either affectively congruent or incongruent. Participants are asked to decide whether the target string is a real English word or not, responding via keypress. At the end of each trial, participants will be asked to recall and confirm the character string presented at the beginning. Cognitive load is manipulated through the complexity of memorized character strings. We will record the N400 response known to index semantic integration difficulty using magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording. We hypothesized that a high cognitive load would decrease priming effects and result in reduced N400 amplitudes and increased reaction times for congruent and incongruent conditions. Additionally, we expect to observe an initial N400 lateralization response in the left hemisphere and a subsequent shift to the right hemisphere following semantic priming. This study aims to clarify how cognitive load influences the neural and behavioral mechanisms underlying emotional semantic priming.
Topic Areas: Control, Selection, and Executive Processes, Meaning: Lexical Semantics