How Arousal Affects Younger and Older Adults' Memory Binding

Abstract

A number of recent studies have shown that associative memory for within-item features is enhanced for emotionally arousing items, whereas arousal-enhanced binding is not seen for associations between distinct items (for a review see Mather, 2007). The costs and benefits of arousal in memory binding have been examined for younger adults but not for older adults. The present experiment examined whether arousal would enhance younger and older adults' withinitem and between-item memory binding. The results revealed that arousal improved younger adults' within-item memory binding but not that of older adults. Arousal worsened both groups' between-item memory binding.Memory binding is an essential component of episodic memory; it allows people to remember a combination of features of an object, a person, or an event. For example, if you witness a car accident, your ability to bind disparate elements of an event together will determine whether you remember which driver was in each car. How does having an emotionally arousing component as part of an event affect memory binding? Recent laboratory studies indicate that the emotional arousal elicited by a stimulus item (such as a picture or word) can either enhance or impair later memory for the features or context associated with that item. For instance, a number of studies have found that memory for the color or location of emotional items is better than memory for the color or location of neutral items (Doerksen

The effects of emotional arousal and gender on the associative memory deficit of older adults

“…1) in memory for the associations between emotionally arousing words, relative to neutral ones. Although the use of integrated adjective-noun pairs in Experiment 2 failed to reduce the AD in older adult memory performance, it is important to note that we did not obtain the typical trade-off in emotional associative memory (e.g., Nashiro & Mather, 2011), but instead, we obtained a pattern of results in which associations between neutral and emotionally arousing items were remembered equally well as neutral-neutral associations. The difference in results between our study and Nashiro and Mather's likely reflects differences in the types of stimuli used between the two experiments, such that our stimuli consisted of samevalence arousing pairs or adjective-noun pairs that were likely more easily integrated than Nashiro and Mather's stimuli (i.e., random shapes and pictures).…”

“…1) with similar results. Additionally, Nashiro and Mather (2011) recently reported a study in which item and associative memory were tested for emotionally arousing and neutral materials in young and older adults. The results were consistent with Mather's (2007) object-based framework, such that young adults remembered emotionally arousing intraitem associations better than neutral ones.…”

“…2). Additionally, past research examining emotional associations (e.g., Doerksen & Shimamura, 2001;Nashiro & Mather, 2011) has typically used paired emotional and neutral items. As we noted above, Pierce and Kensinger (2011) recently reported no effect of emotional arousal on memory for intact associations between words of the same valence in young adults.…”

Binding neutral information to emotional contexts: Brain dynamics of long-term recognition memory

“…Some researchers found better memory for contextual features of emotional items (e.g., Doerksen & Shimamura, 2001;Mather & Nesmith, 2008;Nashiro & Mather, 2011) and neutral items embedded in arousing contexts (e.g., Guillet & Arndt, 2009;Pierce & Kensinger, 2011), whereas others found impairments in memory performance (e.g., Bisby & Burgess, 2014;Nashiro & Mather, 2011;Rimmele, Davachi, Petrov, Dougal, & Phelps, 2011;Touryan, Marian, & Shimamura, 2007) or no effects (e.g., Koenig & Mecklinger, 2008; when retrieving emotional, relative to neutral, contextual source information (e.g., paired words, background scenes or features). Smith, Dolan, and Rugg (2004) explored ERPs related to immediate recognition of emotionally neutral objects associated with emotional and nonemotional background scenes.…”

The role of attention in the associative binding of emotionally arousing words

“…This finding is termed emotionally enhanced memory (EEM; Talmi, Schimmack, Paterson, & Moscovitch, 2007) and has been observed across numerous experimental manipulations (see Kensinger, 2009, for a review). Although robust, EEM is sometimes eliminated or reversed in situations that demand associative binding between two emotional items (e.g., Naveh-Benjamin, Maddox, Jones, Old, & Kilb, 2012;Pierce & Kensinger, 2011) or between emotional and neutral items (e.g., Nashiro & Mather, 2011).…”