Figure 1

Illustration of the Emotional face n-back task. Legend: Illustrated here is an example of the happy-face 2-back condition. The participants were provided with detailed instructions regarding the 0-back and the 2-back task during a practice session. For the 0-back task, participants were instructed to press a button with their index finger when the target letter was shown. For the 2-back task, participants were instructed to press the button when the letter shown was the same as the letter shown two trials before. No reference was made to the distractors flanking the letters. Before each block, participants were informed whether the next block would be a 0-back or a 2-back condition. The face stimuli used as distractors in the experiment were color photographs of actors taken from the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces (KDEF) set³⁴ (http://www.emotionlab.se/resources/kdef). Other photographs were used in this figure for illustration purposes. ITI = intertrial interval.