Emotional salience modulates the forward flow of memory

Abstract

Conditional response probability (CRP) analyses applied to free recall data indicate that recall occurs for contiguous items with forward-directionality, thought to reflect the shared encoding context of nearby items. We hypothesized that a context disruption, produced by presenting infrequent oddballs, would modulate CRP curves, increasing the forward-flow of recall due to strong binding of items presented after these oddballs to the new encoding context. Seventy young, healthy male and female participants encoded word lists containing either emotional or perceptual oddballs at varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA) followed by free recall. Serial recall transitions from emotional, but not perceptual, oddballs were enhanced in the forward direction except at the shortest SOA (1s). The present results provide empirical evidence of CRP modulation selectively by emotional salience and suggest that recall patterns after presenting emotional and perceptual oddballs are mediated by different mechanisms.

Attentional fluctuations and the temporal organization of memory

“…Individuals likely used semantic information to guide recall in our Studies, but we nevertheless observed consistent and reliable temporal structure in recall as well: every Study showed a robust temporal contiguity effect in recall. This is in line with prior work demonstrating that, while many variables -such as list length, presentation times, incidental vs. intentional encoding, emotional salience, and interitem distraction -can influence the the magnitude of the temporal contiguity effect, it tends to be reliably present (Healey et al, 2019;Dester et al, 2020;Lazarus et al, 2020;Peris-Yague et al, 2021).…”