Contributions of Arousal, Attention, Distinctiveness, and Semantic Relatedness to Enhanced Emotional Memory: An Event-Re
- PDF / 1,665,933 Bytes
- 14 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 82 Downloads / 191 Views
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Contributions of Arousal, Attention, Distinctiveness, and Semantic Relatedness to Enhanced Emotional Memory: An Event-Related Potential and Electrocardiogram Study Vanessa C. Zarubin 1 & Timothy K. Phillips 2 & Eileen Robertson 2 & Paige G. Bolton Swafford 2 David Aguillard 3 & Carolyn Martsberger 3 & Katherine R. Mickley Steinmetz 2
&
Taylor Bunge 2 &
Received: 9 December 2019 / Accepted: 17 July 2020 # The Society for Affective Science 2020
Abstract Enhanced emotional memory (EEM) describes memory benefits for emotional items, traditionally attributed to impacts of arousal at encoding; however, attention, semantic relatedness, and distinctiveness likely also contribute in various ways. The current study manipulated arousal, semantic relatedness, and distinctiveness while recording changes in event-related potentials and heart rate during memory encoding. Trials were classified as remembered or forgotten by immediate recall performance. Negative images were remembered significantly better than neutral, and related neutral images were remembered significantly better than unrelated neutral images. Higher P300 and late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes were associated with memory for negative images as compared with related neutral images, suggesting that negative images received additional attentional processing at encoding, and that this cannot be accounted for only by the inherent relatedness of negative stimuli. No encoding benefits were found for related neutral images though they were better remembered than unrelated neutral images, indicating retrieval dynamics impacted memory. When image types were intermixed, greater heart rate changes occurred, and negative and unrelated neutral images received increased elaborative processing as compared with related neutral images, perhaps due to the prioritization of encoding resources. These results suggest encoding and retrieval processes contribute to EEM, with emotional items benefiting additively. Keywords EEG . EKG . Episodic memory . Emotion . Semantic relatedness . Distinctiveness
Experiencing an emotional event triggers a complex neuropsychological process that unfolds over time. The event engages arousal and alert systems (Reisberg & Heuer, 2004), and attention is prioritized towards some stimuli (Mather & Sutherland, 2011) which results in increased accuracy and vividness of memory (Kensinger, 2007). Though many theories have focused on Handling editor: Elizabeth Kensinger Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-020-00012-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
arousal leading to enhanced attention at encoding, the reason for the enhancement of emotional memory (EEM) is likely more complicated (Talmi, Lohnas, & Daw, 2017). To investigate this, participants often study and later recall negative and neutral images. Negative images are frequently processed as distinctive, recruiting different processing relative to neutral images in temporal
Data Loading...
