Setting the alarm: Word emotional attributes require consolidation to be operational.

Abstract

Demonstrations of emotional Stroop in conditioned made-up words are flawed due to the lack of task ensuring similar word encoding across conditions. Here, participants were trained on associations between made-up words (e.g., 'drott') and pictures with an alarming or neutral content (e.g., 'a dead sheep' versus 'a munching cow') in a situation that required attention to both ends of each association.To test whether word emotional attributes need to consolidate before they can hijack attention, one set of associations was learnt seven days before the test, whereas the other set was learnt either six hours or immediately before the test. The novel words' ability to evoke their emotional attributes was assessed using both Stroop and an auditory analogue called pause detection. Matching words and pictures was harder for alarming associations. However, similar learning rate and forgetting at seven days were observed for both types of associations. Pause detection revealed no emotion effect for same-day (i.e., unconsolidated) associations, but robust interference for seven-day-old (i.e., consolidated) alarming associations. Attention capture was found in the emotional Stroop as well, though only when trial n-1 referred to a same-day association. This task also showed stronger response repetition priming (independently of emotion) when trials n and n-1 both tapped into sevenday-old associations. Word emotional attributes hence take between six hours and seven days to be operational. Moreover, age interactions between consecutive trials can be used to gauge implicitly the indirect (relational) episodic associations that develop in the meantime between the memories of individual items.

Priming Emotional Salience Reveals the Role of Episodic Memory and Task Conflict in the Non-color Word Stroop Task

“…Sharma suggested that the PC-TC model could explain this finding by assuming an episodic memory unit that holds the studied words temporarily and activates the word reading task demand unit, which can result in task conflict (see Figure 1). In addition, Sharma showed that in the second half of the mixed block, when presumably PC diminishes, there was a reversed sequential modulation in which studied words had longer latencies when preceded by studied words, compared to when preceded by unstudied words (for a similar finding with studied non-words see Dumay et al, 2018). This is consistent with a task conflict explanation that is due to reactive control from studied words.…”