Can the memory of an object be enhanced by imagining its loss?

Abstract

Previous investigations examining salient memories have demonstrated that personal memories that are important to individuals and contain emotional information are better remembered than neutral events. Using behavioral and brain-imaging experiments, the present studies explored whether the previous finding was applicable imagined loss. In a behavioral experiment, a free recall paradigm was used to compare the memory performance of individuals who imagined loss with that of individuals who imagined importance. The superior memory performance conferred by imagining loss was constrained to ordinary items of low to medium importance and did not generalize to vital items. Moreover, brain imaging evidence revealed that the activation in certain brain regions was stronger when participants were imagining the loss of ordinary items of low to medium importance compared to vital items. These brain regions included cognitive effort-related areas (such as the parietal cortex and middle prefrontal cortex) and areas related to emotional experiences and emotion-related memories (such as the amygdala, parahippocampal gyrus, and posterior cingulate gyrus). Our study provides a new way of exploring the superior memory performance when imagining loss and enriches the literature on memory enhancement by contributing to a deeper understanding of the psychological mechanisms related to the imagining of vital losses. . Research has also revealed that the more closely an object is related to the self, the better it is remembered. The best memory recall is observed for information about one's self, followed by information about one's mother and friends, whereas the poorest memory performance is observed for information about strangers [2]. This phenomenon occurs because people pay more attention to self-referential information, which promotes the organization and elaboration of memories. For example, women typically have better memory performances for weight-related words given that they care more about their weight than men. Men often show better memory performance for muscle-related words given that they pay more attention to their muscle strength [3]. Additionally, individuals are more likely to remember emotional information compared with information that is lacking in emotional importance. Abundant evidence from source memory paradigms and remember-know procedures indicates that individuals' memories are more detailed with regard to emotional information than for neutral information [4]. Neuroimaging studies have implicated the prefrontal cortex and medial temporal areas in the successful encoding of material into episodic memory [5]. The amygdala is also activated when emotional memories are recalled [6]. Imaging studies also emphasize that the amygdala's arous-