Effects of emotional distraction on prospective memory

Though there is evidence that task-irrelevant emotional stimuli affect processes that are important for successful prospective remembering such as cognitive control as well as attention, and while a growing body of research suggests that prospective memory (PM) performance is influenced by emotional PM cues, it remains unclear whether task-irrelevant emotional stimuli also affect PM performance. In this study, we thus want to investigate the effects of emotional distraction on PM performance. To test this, we will modify the paradigm used by Goschke and Dreisbach (2008), in which a PM task is embedded in an on-going spatial-compatibility task. The study will be conducted as an online experiment using the online plattform Labvanced (Goeke et al., 2017). In each of the trials, an arrow will appear at the upper, lower, left or right position. The arrow can also face in different directions that are either compatible with its position or incompatible (i.e., the opposite direction). In the ongoing task, participants must respond to the position the arrow is located at by pressing the corresponding arrow key. As for the PM task, participants will be instructed to react to any arrow pointing downward for half of the experiment and any arrow appearing at the lower position for the other half of the experiment by pressing the spacebar. In line with the procedure used by previous studies, every trial will be preceded by task-irrelevant picture stimuli that will either be of neutral or emotional content, whereby emotional distractors will consist of high arousing picture stimuli (e.g., Straub et al., 2020). As the existing literature provides mixed results regarding the dissociable effects of positive and negative stimuli on cognitive control and attention, we will present emotional distractors of both positive and negative valence. Picture stimuli will be taken from the Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS; Marchewka et al., 2014).