No abstract

Recent experiments have implied that emotional arousal causes a narrowing of attention and, therefore, impoverished memory encoding. In contrast, other studies have found that emotional arousal enhances memory for all aspects of an event. We report two experiments investigating whether these differing results are due to the different retention intervals employed in past studies or to their different categorization schemes for the to-be-remembered material. Our results indicate a small role for retention interval in moderating emotion's effects on memory. However, emotion had markedly different impacts on different types of material: Emotion improved memory for gist and basic-level visual information and for plot-irrelevant details associated, both temporally and spatially, with the event's center. In contrast, emotion undermined memory for details not associated with the event's center. The mechanisms for emotion's effects are discussed.The emotional events in one's life tend to be remembered with great clarity and detail (e.g., Bohannon, 1988; Brown & Kulik, 1977;Pillemer, 1984;Reisberg, Heuer, McLean, & O'Shaughnessy, 1988;Rubin & Kozin, 1984;White, 1989). But how accurate are these memories? There are a number of cases in which conspicuous errors have been documented in the recall of emotional events, despite the great vividness and high confidence attached to these memories (Christianson, 1989; Linton, 1975, pp. 386-387; McCloskey, Wible, & Cohen, 1988;Neisser, 1982;Neisser & Harsch, 1990;Wagenaar & Groeneweg, 1990). Apparently, neither emotionality nor vividness provides any guarantee of memory accuracy.In fact, there is reason to believe that emotional events may be remembered less completely than neutral events.According to the Easterbrook hypothesis, physiological arousal leads to a "narrowing" of attention-that is, a reduction in the range of cues to which an organism is sensitive (e.g., Bruner, Matter, & Papanek, 1955;Easterbrook, 1959;Eysenck, 1982;Mandler, 1975). Since arousal generally accompanies emotion, emotion should also lead to this narrowing of attention. This should in tum lead to impoverished memories, since the "center" of the event might be well remembered, but little else will be. If, therefore, many details are subsequently recalled, these are likely to be after-the-fact reconstructions and, thus, open to error. A number of studies have examined these claims, but with conflicting results. Much of the research has examined memory for specific details about emotional events (color of clothing, details of background, etc.). It is This research was supported by funds from the Pew Charitable Trust and from Reed College. We thank Ben Harper for his help in completing Experiment I, and Audrey Wessler for her help in completing Experiment 2. Requests for reprints should be sent to the third author at Psychology Department, Reed College, Portland OR 97202 (e-mail: reisberg@reed.edu).presumably just these details that might be excluded by the hypothesized narrowing of attention. These specific ...

No abstract

Early in a scientific debate, before much evidence has accumulated, why are some scientists inclined toward one position and other scientists toward the opposite position? We explore this issue with a focus on scientists' views of the 'imagery debate' that unfolded in Cognitive Science during the late 1970s and early 1980s. We examine the possibility that, during the early years of this debate, researchers' views were shaped by their own conscious experiences with imagery. Consistent with this suggestion, a survey of 150 psychologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists showed that those who experienced their own visual imagery as vivid and picture-like recall being more sympathetic in 1980 to the view that, in general, images are picture-like. Similarly, those who have vivid images and who regularly use their images in cognition were more inclined to believe that issues of image vividness deserve more research.It is the nature of science that theoretical disputes are usually resolved through the collection of data-data that favour one theoretical position over another, or perhaps data that demand a recasting of the scientific questions at issue. To be sure, other factors beyond the data do play a role (Barber, 1961;Brewer and Chin, 1994;Kuhn, 1963), but there is no question that the collection and scrutiny of evidence is central to the scientific process.What should scientists do, though, prior to the evidence becoming available-e.g. while the data are accumulating? It is clear to anyone who has watched a scientific debate unfold that the participants do not remain neutral, endorsing none of the (not yet clearly supported) theoretical positions. Instead, they take a position and are then guided in their thinking by the assumptions and implications of that position. But what is it-prior to the data's becoming available-that leads a scientist to endorse one side of a theoretical dispute rather than another? And for those colleagues who do manage initially to remain neutral in a theoretical dispute, why is it that some will subsequently take a position after only a few relevant findings are available, whereas others require more and stronger evidence before taking a stance?

Although much recent research has emphasized the equivalence between imagery and perception, there are critical differences between these activities: Perception, initiated by an external stimulus, is to a large extent concerned with the interpretation of that stimulus. Images, in contrast, are created as symbols of something and hence need no interpretive process. Without a construal process, images do not allow reconstrual. In support of this argument, we ask whether subjects can reverse an ambiguous figure in mental imagery. In three experiments, no subject was ever able to reverse a mental image. In contrast, all of the subjects were able, immediately after this failure, to draw a picture from their mental image and then reconstrue the figure in their own drawing. This failure to reverse images occurs despite hints to the subject, some coaching, and a moderate amount of training in figural reversal. This study emerged from discussions in a seminar on mental imagery that was made possible by a grant from the Exxon Foundation for the support of jointly taught graduate courses. We want to thank the participants in that seminar, especially