Arousal-enhanced location memory for pictures☆
Section snippets
Experiment 1
This experiment tested whether there would be an effect of arousal on memory for the locations of individual pictures. In an incidental encoding task, participants each viewed some arousing and some non-arousing pictures that appeared one at a time in a particular location and alternated with dots. The task was to indicate the color of the dots. Later, participants were tested on their memory for the picture-location conjunctions. In addition, across participants we manipulated whether there
Experiment 2
In this experiment, we examined whether the arousal advantage would occur even if the pictures were grouped such that all the arousing pictures occurred in a row and all the non-arousing pictures occurred in a row. In addition, in one condition, participants saw the pictures and the dots in separate mini-blocks, with four pictures appearing one after the other without any intervening stimuli followed by four dots in a row. We compared this blocked-dot presentation condition to an
Experiment 3
In Experiment 3, we examined whether memory for a picture’s location is impaired or enhanced when an arousing picture is shown at the same time in another location on the screen. As in Experiment 1, pictures alternated with dots. However, in each trial two pictures were shown at the same time on the screen.
Experiment 4
Experiments 1–3 reveal a consistent pattern of better location memory for arousing than for non-arousing pictures. An important question is whether this enhanced location memory is the result of the same mechanisms that enhance memory for arousing pictures. Although we did not test item memory, results of previous studies indicate that recognition or recall of the pictures themselves should also be better when they are emotionally arousing than non-arousing. Enhanced location memory may be a
General discussion
In each of the four experiments, we found that people are better at remembering the location of arousing pictures than non-arousing pictures seen during an incidental encoding task. This arousal-enhanced location binding for pictures appears to be a highly reliable effect and is consistent with previous studies showing better memory for the color or location of emotional than neutral words (D’Argembeau and Van der Linden, 2004, Doerksen and Shimamura, 2001, Kensinger and Corkin, 2003, MacKay
Conclusion
In order to accurately remember an event, one must remember not only the various elements, but also the way that they were related to each other. This study provides evidence that the emotional arousal associated with one element of an event enhances memory for the location of that element but does not have any impact on how well the location of other elements will be recalled. These findings provide new information about how emotional arousal shapes memory for the relationships among different
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2022, International Journal of PsychophysiologyCitation Excerpt :However, results from existing findings regarding emotionality's effect on source memory are mixed, source memory refers to the memory for details (e.g., temporal order, spatial location, color, and so forth) that accompany the central component of an event (Chiu et al., 2013; Johnson, 1993; Minor and Herzmann, 2019). Specifically, previous studies suggest that source memory accuracy may benefit from emotion, when the target stimuli are emotionally salient, or the source details are intra-item features (e.g., word font color), these details may be more easily integrated with the item relative others (Diana et al., 2008; Mather and Nesmith, 2008; Newsome et al., 2012). Yet, the emotional salience is not always relevant for the target stimuli and may represent as extrinsic features of the target stimuli, for example, emotional information is concomitantly presented with the target item during encoding (Cui et al., 2016; Pereira et al., 2021), in this case, emotion is task-irrelevant contextual information, may impair source memory performance (Maratos and Rugg, 2001; Ventura-Bort et al., 2020a).
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2021, Biological PsychologyCitation Excerpt :It should be also noted that contradictory results have been found for how emotional arousal influences the within-item associative memory (Kensinger & Corkin, 2003; Mather & Nesmith, 2008; Mackenzie et al., 2015). Some studies found color and location of negative words were better remembered than neutral (Kensinger & Corkin, 2003; Mather & Nesmith, 2008); whereas, some other studies found an impairment effect of emotion on binding of scene and its color (Mackenzie et al., 2015), as the present study. Based on the object-based account, emotional arousal would enhance the within-item association memory since more attentional resources are directed to emotional items and the within-item features that can be integrated with emotional items in perception (Mather, 2007).
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2021, Building and EnvironmentCitation Excerpt :Among the effects of sound sources, the reaction times under noise and music were found to be shorter than those under natural sounds. This was mainly because the human working efficiency is the highest in the medium arousal level [63]. In another psychological acoustic study, loudness and roughness were found to account for the annoyance ratings of road traffic noise and ventilation noise.
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This work was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging (AG025340).