Figure 3.

Diagram of the delayed-recognition WM paradigm in Experiment 2 and 3. Three types of distractors (pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant) were pseudorandomly presented during the maintenance stage. Volunteers were trained to learn and maintain the pair of faces into WM, look at the distractor, and then decide whether the face at the recognition stage was one of the two previously encoded or not, by pressing one of two keys. In a separate block, volunteers performed a fourth experimental condition with a maintenance period free of distraction.