Brain Systems Mediating Cognitive Interference by Emotional Distraction

By Florin Dolcos, Gregory McCarthy. Journal of Neuroscience, 2006

663 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Flexible behavior depends on our ability to cope with distracting stimuli that can interfere with the attainment of goals. Emotional distracters can be particularly disruptive to goal-oriented behavior, but the neural systems through which these detrimental effects are mediated are not known. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the effect of emotional and nonemotional distracters on a delayed-response working memory (WM) task. As expected, this task evoked robust activity during the delay period in typical WM regions (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and lateral parietal cortex). Presentation of emotional distracters during the delay interval evoked strong activity in typical emotional processing regions (amygdala and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex) while simultaneously evoking relative deactivation of the WM regions and impairing WM performance. These results provide the first direct evidence that the detrimental effect of emotional distracters on ongoing cognitive processes entails the interaction between a dorsal neural system associated with “cold” executive processing and a ventral system associated with “hot” emotional processing.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ff440ab939ad4508c29983d9f2505b66236977b1

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

The Neural Basis of Inhibition in Cognitive Control (2007, background): “…IFC activation as a sign of cognitive inhibition in controlling the pain of social exclusion (Eisenberger and others 2003), emotional distraction (Dolcos and McCarthy 2006), racial bias (Lieberman and others 2005), negative affect (Phan and others 2005), and superficially attractive options…”
Increased amygdala and decreased dorsolateral prefrontal BOLD responses in unipolar depression: related and independent features. (2007, background): “006-3223/07/$32.00 oi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2006.05.048 healthy (Dolcos and McCarthy 2006) and depressed individuals (Siegle et al 2002).”
Mechanisms of Attentional Biases towards Threat in the Anxiety Disorders: An Integrative Review (2009, background): “Dolcos and McCarthy (2006) found that fear-related distracter pictures impaired working memory and that PFC activity was strongly inversely correlated with the degree to which the emotional pictures distracted the participants (r = −.”
An integrated process model of stereotype threat effects on performance. (2008, background): “We might also expect that monitoring emotionally arousing cues is particularly taxing to working memory (Dolcos & McCarthy, 2006).”
Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function (2009, neutral): “Emotional distractors can similarly diminish dorsolateral PFC activity in subjects performing a working memory tas”
Arousal-biased competition in perception and memory (2011, neutral): “Consistent with this possibility, when focusing on task-relevant stimuli in the presence of emotional distractors, amygdala activity increases while activity in the frontoparietal network decreases (Dolcos & McCarthy, 2006; D.G.V. Mitchell et al., 2008).”
Trait and State Differences in Working Memory Capacity (2010, background): “As reviewed ea rlier, Kane and Engle (2000) and Rosen and Eng le (\ 997) have demon strated that load diminishes sca rce WM resources.”
On the relationship between emotion and cognition (2008, background): “Here, I have articulated the view that, in many cases, we must go beyond understanding interactions, some of which are suggested to be mutually antagonisti”
Insights into the neural basis of response inhibition from cognitive and clinical neuroscience. (2009, neutral): “…of sensory aspects of emotional memories (Depue et al., 2007; Banich et al., 2009) and the suppression of interference from task-irrelevant stimuli (de Fockert et al., 2001; Dolcos and McCarthy, 2006; Michael et al., 2006 ) are in keeping with a broader inhibitory profile for this region.”
Modulating prefrontal cortex activity to alleviate stress-induced working memory deficits: A transcranial direct current (tDCS) study (2024, unknown): “The amygdala is known to influence emotional responses, and increased activation has been associated with decreased cognitive performance (Dolcos & McCarthy, 2006; LeDoux, 2003).”