Arousal-enhanced location memory for pictures

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Abstract

Four experiments revealed arousal-enhanced location memory for pictures. After an incidental encoding task, participants were more likely to remember the locations of positive and negative arousing pictures than the locations of non-arousing pictures, indicating better binding of location to picture. This arousal-enhanced binding effect did not have a cost for the binding of temporally or spatially adjacent pictures to their locations. Thus, arousal can enhance binding of an arousing picture’s content to its location without interfering with picture-location binding for nearby pictures. In addition, arousal-enhanced picture-location memory binding is not just a side effect of enhanced memory for the picture itself, as it occurs both when recognition memory is good and when it is poor.

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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    This work was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging (AG025340).

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