How emotional factors influence visual organization remains incompletely understood, particularly beyond early sensory processing. Across three experiments, we investigated whether emotional facial expressions modulate perceptual grouping and whether individual affective factors contribute to this modulation. Participants judged the global orientation of stimuli defined by visual contrast while fearful, happy, or neutral faces served as task-irrelevant primes. Study 1 replicated the contrast-dependent reduction in grouping-related decision efficiency reported by Han and Humphreys (1999). In Studies 2 and 3, primes produced emotion-specific effects. Happy faces slowed responses, particularly under low-contrast conditions, whereas fearful faces were associated with faster and more uniform responses when emotional context was stable. Individual differences in mood and interoceptive awareness predicted performance primarily under happy or neutral conditions but showed minimal influence under fearful priming. Together, these findings indicate that fear and happiness modulate perceptual grouping in a context- and state-dependent manner, highlighting how external emotional cues and internal affective states jointly shape perceptual organization.

Understanding how environmental contexts influence cognitive functioning is a key issue in cognitive science and applied ergonomics. This study examined whether everyday environmental settings modulate task performance and perceived cognitive workload during a card-matching memory task, using high-fidelity immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environments. Participants performed the task by sequentially uncovering cards and remembering their spatial locations to identify matching pairs in two virtual scenarios: a naturalistic environment (urban park) and an artificial setting (office). The number of moves and time of execution were collected as behavioral measures. Perceived cognitive workload was assessed after task completion in each condition using the Simulation Task Load Index (SIM-TLX). Behavioral performances did not differ between environments. However, participants reported lower perceived cognitive workload when performing the task in the naturalistic environment. This effect was not uniform across individuals: the reduction in perceived cognitive workload was primarily observed among participants exhibiting high levels of task efficiency. These findings suggest that environmental context interacts with individual cognitive efficiency by modulating the perceived cognitive workload without necessarily affecting objective performance outcomes. Overall, the results suggest that naturalistic immersive virtual contexts may mitigate perceived cognitive workload during memory-based tasks, highlighting the role of contextual factors in influencing cognitive efforts under ecologically valid conditions.