Recognizing images: The role of motivational significance, complexity, social content, age, and gender

Abstract

Memory for affective events plays an important role in determining people’s behavior and well‐being. Its determinants are far from being completely understood. We investigated how recognition memory for affective pictures depends on pictures’ motivational significance (valence and arousal), complexity (figure‐ground compositions vs. scenes), and social content (pictures with people vs. without people) and on observers’ age and gender. Younger, middle‐aged, and older adults viewed 84 pictures depicting real‐life situations. After a break, the participants viewed 72 pictures, half of which had been viewed previously and half of which were novel, and were asked to endorse whether each picture was novel or had been presented previously. Hits, false alarms, and overall performance (discrimination accuracy) were our dependent variables. The main findings were that, across participants, recognition memory was better for unpleasant than pleasant pictures and for pictures depicting people than pictures without people. Low‐arousal pictures were more accurately recognized than high‐arousal pictures, and this effect was significantly larger among middle‐aged and older adults than younger adults. Recognition memory worsened across adulthood, and this decline was steeper among men than women. Middle‐aged and older women outperformed their male counterparts. This study suggests that how well we are able to successfully discriminate previously seen pictorial stimuli from novel stimuli depends on several pictures’ properties related to their motivational significance and content, and on observer’s age and gender.

Episodic Memory through a Social and Emotional Lens

“…In one study, women demonstrated better item recognition memory for happy faces, but not neutral or negative faces, in comparison to men (Wang, 2013). Gomez et al (2020) observed greater item recognition memory in women versus men, yet this enhancement was not driven by differences in responding to emotional or social content. Additionally, Naveh-Benjamin et al (2012) found that older women demonstrated better associative recognition memory for emotionally negative images than men, though this effect was not seen in younger adults.…”

“…These findings suggest that social and emotional cues may exert either reinforcing or competing effects on recognition memory, depending upon the type of memory under investigation, and thus are likely driven by at least partially distinct underlying mechanisms. Finally, prior research has been equivocal regarding gender differences in emotional and social memory (Asperholm et al, 2019;Gomez et al, 2020;Wang, 2013), potentially related to small sample sizes and piecemeal examination of social and emotional effects. Offsetting these limitations, the present study found an enhancement of associative recognition memory performance overall in women compared to men, but no reliable gender differences in item recognition or social or emotional memory performance specifically.…”

“…The current study employs one of the largest and most diverse samples to date to examine gender differences in emotional memory, and thus may provide a more definitive contribution to the inconsistent findings of this body of work. Notably, most studies that observed null gender effects on item recognition memory also involved larger, more diverse community samples (e.g., Gomez et al, 2020;Naveh-Benjamin et al, 2012;Spalek et al, 2015), whereas studies that have reported significant gender effects primarily involve small samples of undergraduate students (e.g., Cahill & van Stegeren, 2003;Canli et al, 2002). Recent reviews and meta-analyses suggest that women and men tend to be more alike than different across a range of neurocognitive domains (e.g., Asperholm et al, 2020;Hirnstein et al, 2019), and that the small differences observed in memory, when they do occur, may arise from differences in socialization and cultural expectations of men and women rather than innate or biological causes (e.g., caregivers talk about emotions more frequently with girls than with boys; Raval & Walker, 2019).…”

Episodic memory through a social and emotional lens.

“…The current study employs one of the largest and most diverse samples to date to examine gender differences in emotional memory and thus may provide a more definitive contribution to the inconsistent findings of this body of work. Notably, most studies that observed null gender effects on item recognition memory also involved larger, more diverse community samples (e.g., Gomez et al, 2020; Naveh-Benjamin et al, 2012; Spalek et al, 2015), whereas studies that have reported significant gender effects primarily involve small samples of undergraduate students (e.g., Cahill & van Stegeren, 2003; Canli et al, 2002). Recent reviews and meta-analyses suggest that women and men tend to be more alike than different across a range of neurocognitive domains (e.g., Asperholm et al, 2020; Hirnstein et al, 2019), and that the small differences observed in memory, when they do occur, may arise from differences in socialization and cultural expectations of men and women rather than innate or biological causes (e.g., caregivers talk about emotions more frequently with girls than with boys; Raval & Walker, 2019).…”

“…Indeed, research suggests social information is more attention grabbing (Thornton & Conway, 2013) though surprisingly less research has explored how social versus nonsocial content is later remembered, especially in the context of emotion. In one study, Gomez and colleagues (2020) found that images containing social information (i.e., images containing people) were better recognized at a later memory test than images with no social information. However, though social images ranged in emotional valence from negative to positive—and negative images were better recognized than neutral images—the authors did not examine potential interactive or additive effects of emotional and social information together.…”