Emotional scene remembering: A combination of disturbing and facilitating effects of emotion?

Abstract

An emotion-induced memory trade-off effect is frequently reported when participants have to memorize complex items that include both neutral and emotional features. This bias corresponds to better remembering of central emotional information accompanied by poor performance related to neutral background information. Although the trade-off effect has been mainly associated with attentional bias toward emotional content, findings suggest that other non-attentional cognitive processes could also be involved. The aim of this work was to assess whether emotional effects would be reported apart from their influence on attentional processing in an immediate delay memory task. Three studies were conducted. In Study 1, manipulation of the diffusion quality of emotional content allowed us to select focal emotional pictures vs. diffuse emotional pictures, which prevented attentional focus. The two studies that followed consisted of a recognition task of low- and high-complexity pictures in which we used partial visual cues during the test that could display either the emotional elements (i.e., central patch cues, Study 2) or the peripheral elements (i.e., peripheral patch cues, Study 3) of the focal emotional pictures. Results from Studies 2 and 3 replicated traditional trade-off effects only for high-complexity pictures. In addition, diffuse emotional pictures were associated with lower memory performance than were neutral pictures, suggesting that emotion features could both disturb and enhance (via their attentional effect) encoding processes.

Temporal memory for threatening events encoded in a haunted house

“…Specifically, threat-related arousal can bias individuals to forget contextual information linking peripheral information of an item to its surrounding context in memory (Clewett & Murty, 2019). While, the majority of research has studied threat-related disruptions in associative memory by characterizing item-spatial binding (Bouvarel et al, 2022;Kim et al, 2013;Steinmetz & Kensinger, 2013;Waring et al, 2010) or item-item binding (e.g. Madan et al, 2012;Okada et al, 2011), emerging literature seeks to characterize its role in item-temporal context binding.…”

Visual Memory for Natural Scenes

“…In general, observers remember positive scenes (e.g., children blowing bubbles) more quickly and with more detail than neutral and negative scenes (e.g., house on fire) (Melcher, 2010). Compared to neutral images, negative images lead to better memory only when a certain negative object serves as the focus within a complex scene, such that observers' attention is drawn toward this emotionally salient object without being able to fully process the rest of the scene (Bouvarel et al, 2022). In contrast, when a scene contains no focal negative object but gives a negative impression overall, memory performance of such a negative scene does not exceed neutral scenes.…”