Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Prior literature provides contradictory claims regarding differences in preferential processing among different emotional stimuli. While some studies have indicated that happy faces are processed more effectively than others, Simione et al. (2014) demonstrated that threat superiority emerges when processing resources are constrained in the visual short term memory. Given the contrasting claims about angry vs. happy faces, we did a modified replication of the same study using real instead of schematic faces. We hypothesized that performance would be better with happy faces. We conducted two experiments by manipulating display times in experiment 1 and set sizes in experiment 2. We found a general emotional superiority effect and a “happiness superiority” effect in both experiments, which contrasts with Simione et al. (2014)’s results. These findings suggest that happy faces receive attentional priority for storage in VSTM, highlighting the need to incorporate saliency-based processing differences in theories of consolidation and processing in visual short-term memory.