Cognition and Affect - Let's try to disentangle them!

Oct 26, 2023 · 4 min read
An EEG participant looks at the number 23 on a monitor. Three faces beside a speaker represent positive, neutral, and negative sounds. Illustration of the EEG task with positive, neutral, and negative sounds.

Research question

Does the mental effort of a task change how the brain responds to emotional sounds in the background? We tested whether EEG measures associated with emotion and workload could help distinguish these effects.

Study design

ParticipantsMain taskDistractors
12 adultsOne- or two-digit additionNegative, neutral, or positive sounds

We recorded mobile EEG and compared frontal alpha asymmetry and a frontal theta-to-parietal alpha workload measure across the six conditions.

What we found

  • Positive sounds elicited different frontal alpha asymmetry under low and high working-memory load.
  • Other differences across distractor types and workload conditions were inconclusive in this pilot sample.

Watch the project presentation

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Electroencephalography (EEG) Interaction Emotion - Cognition Working Memory Load Arithmetics Emotional Processing
Dr. Katharina Lingelbach
Authors
Dr. Katharina Lingelbach
Junior Professor of Neuroergonomics