ERP evidence for the control of emotional memories during strategic retrieval

Abstract

Neural evidence for the strategic retrieval of task-relevant ‘target’ memories at the expense of less relevant ‘nontarget’ memories has been demonstrated across a wide variety of studies. In ERP studies, this evidence consists of the ERP correlate of recollection (i.e. the ‘left parietal old/new effect’) being evident for targets and attenuated for nontargets. It is not yet known, however, whether this degree of strategic control can be extended to emotionally valenced words, or whether these items instead reactivate associated memories. The present study used a paradigm previously employed to demonstrate the strategic retrieval of neutral words (Herron & Rugg, Psychonomic Bulletin and & Review, 10(3), 703-–710, 2003b) to assess the effects of stimulus valence on behavioural and event-related potential (ERP) measures of strategic retrieval. While response accuracy and reaction times associated with targets were unaffected by valence, negative nontargets and new items were both associated with an elevated false alarm rate and longer RTs than their neutral equivalents. Both neutral and negative targets and nontargets elicited early old/new effects between 300 and 500 ms. Critically, whereas neutral and negative targets elicited robust and statistically equivalent left parietal old/new effects between 500 and 800 ms, these were absent for neutral and negative nontargets. A right frontal positivity associated with postretrieval monitoring was evident for neutral targets versus nontargets, for negative versus neutral nontargets, and for targets versus new items. It can therefore be concluded that the recollection of negatively valenced words is subject to strategic control during retrieval, and that postretrieval monitoring processes are influenced by emotional valence.

The power of negative and positive episodic memories

“…Other ERP studies also have demonstrated that when images are unpleasant (Lavoie & O'Connor, 2013) or when neutral images are studied in negative contexts (Liu et al, 2021), those retrieval cues can modulate neural signatures later in the retrieval epoch. These types of results have led to the postulation that negative memories are associated with different retrieval orientations (Liu et al, 2021), with more sustained processing (Ventura-Bort et al, 2020), and with different levels of strategic control during retrieval (Herron, 2017). Together, these results suggest that there may be a privileged access to negative memories, and that once they are brought to mind, there is additional processing granted to the negative content of those memories.…”

Professional discrepancies of doctors and lawyers in episodic memory: Modulations of professional morality and warning

“…In the first place, adopting a sequential paradigm made it hard to separate item memory from source memory completely, which left out the possibilities to conduct direct comparisons using indicators like reaction times. Future studies should consider other paradigms to test source memory directly, such as the exclusion paradigm requiring participants to judge whether an item belongs to a certain encoding status or not (Herron, 2017), or the multi‐key paradigm (Nie, 2018; Zhou et al, 2020). A logical next step would be better to apply alternative paradigms (e.g., the exclusion paradigm and multi‐key paradigm) to revisit the current questions and investigate whether the current findings would occur by looking at indicators like reaction times.…”