Processing Central and Peripheral Detail: How Content Arousal and Emotional Tone Influence Encoding

Arousal (but not valence) amplifies the impact of salience

“…It makes sense that arousal, which signals important events or stimuli, would amplify processing of salience or high priority information. These interactions of arousal and salience may explain findings that arousal increases memory of central details, which are typically the most salient within a scene (Reisberg & Heuer, 2004; Yegiyan & Lang, 2010; see Mather & Sutherland, 2011 for further discussion). While valence does not appear to play a key role in the arousal-salience interactions we observed, recent evidence suggests that negative and positive moods signal whether to continue with current information processing strategies or to switch to a different strategy (Huntsinger, 2013).…”

Emotion and multimedia learning: an investigation of the effects of valence and arousal on different modalities in an instructional animation

“…Because the type of motivational system and its activation level determine the emotional experience of valence and arousal, previous studies of motivated cognition have measured positive valence, negative valence, and arousal, separately by using separate 9-point rating scales (Bolls et al 2001;Bradley and Lang 1994;Lee and Lang 2009;Yegiyan and Lang 2010). The self-report measures have been widely used by matching reliably and consistently to physiological responses, such as heart rates or skin conductance (e.g., Ivory and Kalyanaraman 2007;Schneider et al 2004).…”

Conceptualizing Visual Detail: Message Structure as a Predictor of Preferential Processing

“…Lang, 2006) but also which elements of message content to attend to. Initial support for this proposition has been established in a series of studies aimed at investigating how the emotional tone of the messages influences how central and peripheral detail of messages are encoded and retrieved (Yegiyan, 2012;Yegiyan & Lang, 2010;Yegiyan & Yonelinas, 2011). These studies have produced evidence of a link between motivational system activation and variability in memory for central and peripheral detail, yet the exact proposed mechanism for the effect has not been fully investigated.…”

“…Positive content has been shown to improve attention and memory to a greater degree than neutral material (Talarico, Berntsen, & Rubin, 2009;Yegiyan & Lang, 2010) and to be more appealing than negative content for specific audience groups (Grabe & Kamhawi, 2006). In addition, structural features of media such as pacing (Chock, Fox, Angelini, Lee, & Lang, 2007;Lang, Schwartz, Lee, & Angelini, 2007), information change (Lang, Park, Sanders-Jackson, Wilson, & Wang, 2007), and motion (Lang, Borse, Wise, & David, 2002) have been shown to elicit attention and affect memory.…”