The development of emotional skills and Executive Functions, a term encompassing domain general cognitive processes associated with working memory, inhibitory control, and the flexible shifting of attention, are fundamental steps for the healthy development and maintenance of healthy life. In fact, memorizing emotional stimuli in a preferential way, seems to be one of the human adaptive strategies for supporting development and life.
Scientific evidences have shown the importance of emotion recognition and working memory skills for language development. These skills, often taken for granted in healthy children, are difficult to acquire in children with sensorial deficits like hearing impairment. Studies have investigated the skills of emotion recognition and working memory in children, emphasizing their importance; very few have focused on the evaluation of the neurophysiological correlates of these skills in children with hearing loss. However, no one to date has investigated the relationship between non-verbal emotional stimuli perceived by a dual sensory mode and working memory, in an experimental electroencephalographic (EEG) setting.
The aim of this project is therefore to investigate the neurophysiological and psycho-behavioural characteristics of the impact of audio and video emotional stimuli during a working memory task, in a population of hearing impaired children. The results of this study could bring valuable knowledge to the link between learning and emotion, providing useful tools for intervention in the development of hearing impaired children.
WHEMORCHING is an innovative project because it will allow to investigate in the same experimental protocol working memory and emotions in a double perspective: neurophysiological and psycho-behavioural. Specifically, it will offer the opportunity to assess the impact of the emotional component on auditory and visual working memory by comparing groups of children with hearing impairment and those without. Given the importance of the emotional component and therefore motivational, on the learning of essential functions such as language, illuminate the mechanisms underlying the link between working memory and emotion (both audibly and visually perceived) could provide answers to how the emotional stimulus is perceived in cognitive tasks, regardless of emotion recognition and semantic meaning. In fact the intended use of non-verbal auditory and visual emotional stimuli, will allow to evaluate the pure role played by the characteristics of the emotional stimulus on the cognitive ability of working memory by observing, for the first time simultaneously, both behavioural and neurophysiological evidences.
Surprisingly, through the EEG recording flanked by behavioural and psychometric measures often (rightly) biased by many human factors, it will be possible to increase knowledge about the neural substrates of emotion and memory, obtaining an objective neural signal. Finally, I would like to specify that the use of EEG a non-invasive and perfectly ecological technique, will allow the best adaptation to the little participants without creating bias due to the setting often not considered in other neuroimaging techniques more invasive and less ecological such as fMRI and PET.
The results of the WHEMORCHING project, could further illuminate the understanding of working memory as an essential function of cognitive development by considering the fundamental impact of the ubiquitous emotional aspect. The applicative implications of the results could be realized both in the clinical setting, for a better assessment of the psychological and speech-language outcomes of heating impaired children, and in the global educational setting for a greater consideration of the emotional-motivational component of learning.