Negative Arousal Increases the Effects of Stimulus Salience in Older Adults

Sutherland, Matthew R.; Mather, Mara

doi:10.1080/0361073x.2015.1021644

Cited by 22 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Priority in the competition is determined by both bottom-up perceptual saliency (e.g., stimuli that move suddenly or are brighter than their surroundings; Itti et al, 1998 ) and top-down goal-relevancy (e.g., finding a friend in a crowd; Beck and Kastner, 2009 ). Consistent with ABC, recent studies have demonstrated that emotional arousal facilitates subsequent perception of non-emotional, visually salient stimuli, while impairing perception of non-salient stimuli ( Lee et al, 2012 , 2014b ; Sutherland and Mather, 2012 , 2015 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 64%

Encoding of goal-relevant stimuli is strengthened by emotional arousal in memory

2015

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Emotional information receives preferential processing, which facilitates adaptive strategies for survival. However, the presence of emotional stimuli and the arousal they induce also influence how surrounding non-emotional information is processed in memory (Mather and Sutherland, 2011). For example, seeing a highly emotional scene often leads to forgetting of what was seen right beforehand, but sometimes instead enhances memory for the preceding information. In two studies, we examined how emotional arousal affects short-term memory retention for goal-relevant information that was just seen. In Study 1, participants were asked to remember neutral objects in spatially-cued locations (i.e., goal-relevant objects determined by specific location), while ignoring objects in uncued locations. After each set of objects were shown, arousal was manipulated by playing a previously fear-conditioned tone (i.e., CS+) or a neutral tone that had not been paired with shock (CS–). In Study 1, memory for the goal-relevant neutral objects from arousing trials was enhanced compared to those from the non-arousing trials. This result suggests that emotional arousal helps to increase the impact of top-down priority (i.e., goal-relevancy) on memory encoding. Study 2 supports this conclusion by demonstrating that when the goal was to remember all objects regardless of the spatial cue, emotional arousal induced memory enhancement in a more global manner for all objects. In sum, the two studies show that the ability of arousal to enhance memory for previously encoded items depends on the goal relevance initially assigned to those items.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 64%

Encoding of goal-relevant stimuli is strengthened by emotional arousal in memory

2015

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“…Then, we ran the same analysis on the data of 55 participants from an ageing population (61-80 years old; Sutherland & Mather, 2015). The data from one participant were discarded due to extreme weights, which were more than 7 standard deviations from the group mean in one of the conditions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of arousal on biased competition in attention and short-term memory

Ásgeirsson

Nieuwenhuis

2019

Atten Percept Psychophys

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A recent theory proposes that arousal amplifies the competition between stimulus representations, strengthening already strong representations and weakening already weak representations in perception and memory. Here, we report a stringent test of this arousal-biased competition theory in the context of visual attention and short-term memory. We examined whether pre-trial arousal enhances the bottom-up attentional bias toward physically salient versus less salient stimuli in a multi-letter identification task. Arousal was manipulated by presenting an arousing versus neutral picture (Experiment 1) or sound (Experiment 2) at the start of each trial. Bayesian statistics revealed strong evidence for the null hypothesis in both experiments: arousal did not modulate the effects of physical salience on letter identification. The experiments were repeated with EEG measurements and subjective stimulus ratings, which confirmed that the stimuli successfully manipulated physiological and subjective arousal. These results pose a challenge for the arousalbiased competition theory. Acknowledgements:The authors thank Delia Della Porta, Saskia Heijnen, Yora Kros and Emal Sarwar for their contributions to the data collection. The research was supported by an ERC Starting grant (No. 283314 NOREPI) awarded to S. Nieuwenhuis.RUNNING HEAD: Effects of arousal on attention 3 Arousal, the global state of activation of our central and autonomic nervous system, is one of the driving forces in human cognition and behavior. Stable individual differences in global arousal level can shape temperamental traits and contribute to psychopathology. In addition, global arousal level shows large intra-individual fluctuations, not just those expressed in the sleep-wake rhythm, but also on a much faster time scale: moment-to-moment, spontaneous as well as taskrelated, fluctuations that have large effects on cognition, behavior, and the underlying brain circuitry (

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“…All participants reported having normal or corrected-to-normal vision and hearing. We based our sample size on previous studies using this paradigm (Sutherland & Mather, 2015, 2012)…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Arousal (but not valence) amplifies the impact of salience

Sutherland

Mather

2017

Cognition and Emotion

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Previous findings indicate that negative arousal enhances bottom-up attention biases favoring perceptual salient stimuli over less salient stimuli (Sutherland & Mather, 2012). The current study tests whether those effects were driven by emotional arousal or by negative valence by comparing how well participants could identify visually presented letters after hearing either a negative arousing, positive arousing or neutral sound. On each trial, some letters were presented in a high contrast font and some in a low contrast font, creating a set of targets that differed in perceptual salience. Sounds rated as more emotionally arousing led to more identification of highly salient letters but not of less salient letters, whereas sounds’ valence ratings did not impact salience biases. Thus, arousal, rather than valence, is a key factor enhancing visual processing of perceptually salient targets.

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Negative Arousal Increases the Effects of Stimulus Salience in Older Adults

Cited by 22 publications

References 34 publications

Encoding of goal-relevant stimuli is strengthened by emotional arousal in memory

Encoding of goal-relevant stimuli is strengthened by emotional arousal in memory

Effects of arousal on biased competition in attention and short-term memory

Arousal (but not valence) amplifies the impact of salience

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