ABSTRACT

Evidence has shown that negative distracting stimuli are most difficult to control when we are focused in a relevant task, while positive and neutral distractors might be equally overcome. Still, recent meta-analytic evidence has pointed out that differences in the ability to cope with positive or neutral distractors may be difficult to detect in healthy people and in laboratory sets. Here we re-analyse memory performance in four already published working memory experiments in which affective and non-affective distractors were used. We focused on the positive versus neutral contrast, which did not reveal differences in the original analysis, with the aim of quantifying evidence for the null hypothesis using a Bayesian approach. Bayes factor (BF) estimates show substantial evidence in favour to the absence of differences in three out of four datasets. Further, BF aggregated from the four studies shows stronger evidence for the null hypothesis. Results from this analysis show that WM performance after positive and neutral interference can be considered equivalent, suggesting that positive distractors can be overcome to the same extent as neutral ones.

摘要

有证据表明，当我们专注于相关任务时，负面干扰刺激最难控制，而积极和中性干扰因素可能同样被克服。尽管如此，最近的荟萃分析证据指出，在健康人和实验室环境中，处理积极或中性干扰因素的能力差异可能难以发现。在这里，我们在四个已经发表的工作记忆实验中重新分析了记忆性能，其中使用了情感和非情感干扰因素。我们专注于正对比与中性对比，它没有揭示原始分析中的差异，目的是使用贝叶斯方法量化零假设的证据。贝叶斯因子 (BF) 估计显示了大量证据支持四分之三的数据集不存在差异。此外，从四项研究中汇总的 BF 显示了更强有力的零假设证据。该分析的结果表明，在正面干扰和中性干扰后的 WM 性能可以被认为是等效的，这表明可以在与中性干扰相同的程度上克服正面干扰因素。