Visuospatial working memory performance under emotional face distraction in non-athletes, team-sport athletes, and individual-sport athletes

Sports expertise and emotional face distractors have both been examined in working memory (WM) research; however, little is known about whether visuospatial WM performance under emotional face distraction differs among non-athletes, team-sport athletes, and individual-sport athletes, or whether such effects vary across processing stages. This study addressed these questions in 71 young adults using a delayed-matching task. Angry and happy face distractors were presented during encoding, retrieval, or both stages. Accuracy and reaction time (RT) were analysed with mixed-design ANOVAs and Bayesian statistics. For accuracy, the overall distraction analysis showed no significant effects of distraction presence, participant type, or their interaction. Under distractor-present conditions, no significant main effect of distraction stage or participant type was found, whereas accuracy was slightly higher in happy-face than angry-face parts; interactions were non-significant. For RT, the overall distraction analysis showed slower responses in distractor than no-distractor conditions and a participant-type effect, although pairwise comparisons were non-significant. Under distractor-present conditions, only the distraction stage × distraction type interaction was significant, with longer RTs for happy than angry faces during retrieval. Supplementary analyses yielded a similar pattern. Collectively, the hypothesised group differences were not supported, and emotional face distractor effects were limited and stage- and index-dependent.