Arousal affects short-term serial recall.

Abstract

Arousal affects our lives in a variety of ways; it can direct our attention to what is important in our environment and help us remember it more clearly. However, it remains unclear how arousal impacts shortterm memory. Here we addressed this gap in our knowledge by contrasting four hypotheses: the Arousal Hypothesis, the Priority-Binding Hypothesis, the Rehearsal Hypothesis, and the Rapid-Processing Hypothesis. To distinguish between these competing accounts, we conducted two immediate serial recall experiments in which we manipulated arousal (low-arousal words vs. high-arousal words), list composition (pure vs. mixed), and presentation rate (200 ms vs. 1,000 ms). Overall, participants were better at recalling arousing information, regardless of list type or presentation rate. Our results provide clear evidence in favor of the arousal hypothesis which suggests that arousing information benefits from biologically induced enhancements at encoding. Public Significance StatementWhen studying verbal memory, emotional arousal refers to the level of excitement elicited by a word. However, the effect of arousal on short-term memory is uncertain. The current assessment reveals that arousal enhances performance in a short-term ordered recall task at fast and slower presentation rates, and in both pure and mixed lists.

Additional evidence that valence does not affect serial recall

“…Valence is whether a word is positive (e.g., vacation ) or negative (e.g., pain ), arousal can be thought of as going from calm (e.g., asleep ) to excited (e.g., typhoon ), and dominance can be thought of as going from submissive or “has things done to it” (e.g., meal ) to dominant or “does things to others” (e.g., earthquake ). It has only recently been shown that arousal affects immediate serial recall when valence and dominance are equated ( Landry et al, 2022 ), and that valence does not affect serial recall when arousal and dominance are equated ( Bireta et al, 2021 ). Tse and Altarriba (2022) revisited the effect of valence in immediate serial recall and reported two experiments that yielded two main conclusions.…”