Neural representations of emotional working memory in athletes
Abstract
Research on athletic expertise often emphasizes performance differences, leaving less clear how athletes and non-athletes represent emotional information during working memory. We examined whether group differences involve the timing and content of neural representations as memory demands change. Two experiments used a sequential emotional working memory task with loads of two or four images. Experiment 1 compared 25 athletes (16 female, mean age: 20.16 years) and 25 non-athletes (16 female, mean age: 21.04 years) using positive and negative images; Experiment 2 used negative images and included 36 athletes (19 female, mean age: 19.92 years) and 37 non-athletes (19 female, mean age: 20.41 years) in the final electroencephalography (EEG) sample. EEG time–frequency analysis exhibited that athletes showed lower theta power during encoding and maintaining comparing to non-athletes. Representational similarity analysis (RSA) further revealed that athletes showed greater arousal representations, while non-athletes showed greater semantic representations. When memory demand increased, visual-model similarity suggested that athletes can keep the visual information precisely, but non-athletes showed a load-dependent decline of visual representations. These findings provide novel neural evidence that athlete-related differences in emotional working memory involve the timing and content of neural representations, rather than a uniform behavioral advantage.
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