The role of emotional interference on learning in an emotional probabilistic Go/No-Go task

Abstract

Objective: Reversing learned associations interferes with previously acquired learning, a form of retroactive interference for the previous association and proactive interference on the new learning. We examined associations involving emotional content and how they might impact interference. The current study aims to discover the role positive, negative, and non-emotional stimuli play during acquisition and reversal learning in a probabilistic go/no-go task. Method: The task consisted of separate conditions of happy, sad, angry, fearful emotional stimuli and non-emotional stimuli during separate acquisition and reversal training periods. Ninety-seven participants aged 18-35 (49 females) took part in the study. Results: The results revealed that overall, participants were more accurate during acquisition than reversal. Further, happy stimuli were learned with greater accuracy during acquisition but were no easier to learn in reversal, effectively accompanied by a greater reversal cost. Conclusion: There is evidence that happy emotional stimuli act like stimuli with a stronger learning rate much like learning of other high salience stimuli. Emotion valanced stimuli like other types of stimuli and can be described mechanistically by varying learning rate parameters of associative models.