Abstract:Moderate physiological or emotional arousal induced after learning modulates memory consolidation, helping to distinguish important memories from trivial ones. Yet, the contribution of subjective awareness or interpretation of arousal to this effect is uncertain. Alexithymia, which is an inability to describe or identify one's emotional and arousal states even though physiological responses to arousal are intact, provides a tool to evaluate the role of arousal interpretation. Participants scoring high and low on alexithymia (N = 30 each) learned a list of 30 words, followed by immediate recall. Participants then saw either an arousing (oral surgery) or neutral video (tooth brushing). Memory was tested 24-h later. Physiological

Eighty-five high or low alexithymia participants viewed and rated arousing illness-related (''pain"), emotionally positive (''thrill"), negative (''hatred"), and neutral words (''horse"). Recall was assessed 45 min later.High alexithymia participants recalled significantly fewer negative emotion words but also more illness-related words than low alexithymia participants. The results suggest that personal relevance can shape cognitive processing of stimuli, even to enhance retention of a subclass of stimuli whose retention is generally impaired in alexithymia.

No abstract

Voluminous research supports holistic processing of faces. However, little is known about how holistic processing affects recognition of newly learned faces, a question of importance for improving performance in police lineups and other real-world tasks. Drawing on cognitive and neuropsychological research, we suggest that holistic processing facilitates the formation of unitized representations that support discrimination between old and new faces—including new faces that contain old parts—through a unidimensional familiarity signal. In the absence of holistic processing, face recognition is based on relational representations that are relatively difficult to encode, but which allow flexible recognition decisions based on match–mismatch detection to be made. Unlike unitized representations, relational representations can support judgments that newly encountered faces match previously experienced faces in some respects (e.g., some of their features) and yet not in others (e.g., other features, global configuration). Four experiments clarified the relationship of holistic processing to the formation of unitized and relational representations of faces. By manipulating the extent of holistic processing while controlling for the overall level of recognition performance, we demonstrate qualitative effects of holistic processing on how recognition decisions are made with faces.

No abstract