Event‐related potentials of emotional and neutral memories: The role of encoding position and delayed testing

Abstract

Previous research found that memory is not only better for emotional information but also for neutral information that has been encoded in the context of an emotional event. In the present ERP study, we investigated two factors that may influence memory for neutral and emotional items: temporal proximity between emotional and neutral items during encoding, and retention interval (immediate vs. delayed). Forty-nine female participants incidentally encoded 36 unpleasant and 108 neutral pictures (36 neutral pictures preceded an unpleasant picture, 36 followed an unpleasant picture, and 36 neutral pictures were preceded and followed by neutral pictures) and participated in a recognition memory task either immediately (N = 24) or 1 week (N = 25) after encoding. Results showed better memory for emotional pictures relative to neutral pictures. In accordance, enhanced centroparietal old/new differences (500-900 ms) during recognition were observed for unpleasant compared to neutral pictures, most pronounced for the 1-week interval. Picture position effects, however, were only subtle. During encoding, late positive potentials for neutral pictures were slightly lower for neutral pictures following unpleasant ones, but only at trend level. To summarize, we could replicate and extend previous ERP findings showing that emotionally arousing events are better recollected than neutral events, particularly when memory is tested after longer retention intervals. Picture position during encoding, however, had only small effects on elaborative processing and no effects on memory retrieval.

Behavioral and neural evidence of enhanced long-term memory for untrustworthy faces

“…This also implies that untrustworthy faces do not necessarily need to be stored in a more complex contextual fashion (e.g., recollection) when the evolutionary purpose is to quickly recognize socially relevant information. Interestingly, contrary to prior ERP studies using emotional scenes 38,58 or faces 45 , we did not find a modulation in the recollection-sensitive parietal old/new effect. However, emotional scenes and faces contain more contextual feature information and draw more attention 59,60 than neutral faces, which may have resulted in enhanced recollection-specific contextual binding 61 and enhanced parietal ERP old/new differences in these studies.…”

Differential Effects of Valence and Encoding Strategy on Internal Source Memory and Judgments of Source: Exploring the Production and the Self-Reference Effect

“…As in Experiment 1 the study phase was immediately followed by the test phase, it could be the case that the EEM effect would emerge if longer study-test intervals were implemented (Sharot and Phelps, 2004; Mitchell et al, 2006; Sharot and Yonelinas, 2008; Schaefer et al, 2011; Yick et al, 2015), consistent with consolidation processes (Hamann, 2001; Talmi, 2013). However, previous studies also indicated that even in immediate conditions, negative arousing stimuli can be better recognized than neutral stimuli (e.g., Wirkner et al, 2018). Whereas in Experiment 2 stimuli were controlled for arousal, in Experiment 1 both negative and positive stimuli had higher arousal ratings than neutral ones (according to Soares et al, 2012).…”

Effects of emotional study context on immediate and delayed recognition memory: Evidence from event-related potentials

“…It takes the form of more positive going waveforms for hits than correct rejections between 500 and 700 ms, which are most pronounced at (left) parietal recording sites. Interestingly, this parietal old/new effect for recollection has previously been found to be modulated by emotion (Maratos & Rugg, 2001;Ventura-Bort et al, 2016;Weymar et al, 2011;Wirkner et al, 2018), for example with a parietal old/new effect for emotional, negatively-valenced, but not neutral faces (Johansson et al, 2004).…”