Recognition memory for valenced and arousing materials under conditions of divided attention

Abstract

Two experiments are reported that examined the effect of both valence and arousal on recognition memory performance. Each experiment used two classes of negative items that differed in arousal, as well as a neutral and non-arousing set of items. In Experiment 1 a difficult divided attention task was crossed with the learning and test phases of the experiment. In Experiment 2 encoding time was manipulated and remember-know judgements were collected. The emotional enhancement effect often found with verbal materials survived the depletion of cognitive resources, as did the extra benefit accruing from high arousal. Although we found that arousal led to more recollection, the general conclusion that we draw is that the effect of emotion on recognition memory can be attributed to relatively automatic influences.

Preattentive Processing, Poststimulus Elaboration, and Memory for Emotionally Arousing Stimuli

“…This latter observation indicates that it is difficult to eliminate EEM by using a distractor task that is designed to prevent elaboration. Further, the results in the present experiments are consistent with the findings reported by other researchers (Clark-Foos & Marsh, 2008;Kensinger & Corkin, 2004;Kern et al, 2005). Taken together, it is reasonable to assume that elaboration plays a minor role in remembering negatively arousing picture.…”

“…In other words, remembering emotional details does not require rehearsal (or poststimulus elaboration). Other researchers using emotional words (Clark-Foos & Marsh, 2008;Kensinger & Corkin, 2004) also reported that dividing attention does not eliminate EEM when stimuli are negatively arousing.…”

Automatic processing influences free recall: converging evidence from the process dissociation procedure and remember-know judgments

“…The remember-know procedure (Gardiner, 1988;Rajaram, 1993;Tulving, 1985) involves asking subjects to differentiate between responses for which they can recollect contextual details associated with retrieval (i.e., a remember response) and responses that are devoid of these contextual details (i.e., a know response). The assumption is that remember responses are influenced by recollection to a great degree, and know responses are influenced by automatic processing to a great degree (see Clark-Foos & Marsh, 2008;De Goede & Postma, 2008;Kelley & Jacoby, 1998;Rajaram, 1993). Of particular interest was an examination of whether dividing attention reduced the subjective experience of recollection (i.e., remember judgments) but left subjective experience of familiarity (i.e., know judgments) unaffected (Gardiner & Parkin, 1990), a pattern which would parallel findings using the process dissociation procedure (Jacoby, Toth, & Yonelinas, 1993).…”

Factors affecting medial temporal lobe engagement for past and future episodic events: An ALE meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies

“…It is well known that the enhanced memory capability observed for emotional events is due, at least in part, to the amygdala's influence on encoding and storage of hippocampal-dependent memories, as suggested by many studies showing amygdala activation during the encoding of emotional stimuli predicts subsequent retention (Cahill et al, 1996;Canli et al, 2000;Kensinger and Corkin, 2004). While the left amygdala is more responsive to conscious, language-dependent processing (Markowitsch, 1998;Phelps, 2006), the right amygdala has been shown to subserve a system of automatic detection of emotional stimuli (Kensinger and Corkin, 2004;Costafreda et al, 2008), which can be triggered by recognition tasks (Clark-Foos and Marsh, 2008). The right amygdalar activation for recognition compared to recall/imagine tasks may reflect this automatic process in emotional processing.…”