Bryce C. Romero¹, Bradley E. Buchanan¹, Emily A. Rancorn¹, Laramie L.J. Starling¹, Jacob Zepp², Rachel Gaynor¹, Liana Y. Thielecke¹, Emma Sonenblum¹, Connor Murray³, Chad Dubé¹; ¹University of South Florida, ²University of Zürich, ³American University

When presenting a conference poster, the aim is to keep our audience engaged and deliver information in a clear way, to do so, we must make quick judgments of how our audience is feeling to evaluate and adapt our own behaviors. Ensemble emotional processing (EEP), or the ability to perceive a group’s overall emotion, assists us in making these quick assessments of our audiences’ average emotionality. However, current models of EEP offer conflicting accounts of the dynamic roles of attention and memory during ensemble judgment formation. Specifically, Liu and Ji (2024) reported no effect of attentional load, or the amount of attentional resources required for selective attention, on behavioral markers of EEP. To address this discrepancy, we conducted a replication of their dual-task paradigm while also measuring neural markers in a sample of 33 college students. In particular, we examined the P3b, an event-related brain potential associated with updating new or unexpected information in working memory through selective attentional processes, measured 300–500 ms after stimulus onset. Bayesian linear mixed-effects models revealed that high loads reduced the neural markers of working memory updating for ensemble judgments to a similar degree as for item judgments. Considering that working memory updating did not differ between item and ensemble conditions, this suggests that both types of representations operate similarly within working memory and are subject to comparable attentional constraints when updating is required.