The tenacious nature of memory binding for arousing negative items

Abstract

In two experiments, we investigated whether people are better or worse at updating memory for the location of emotional pictures than of neutral pictures. We measured participants' memories for the locations of both arousing negative pictures and neutral pictures while manipulating practice (encountering the same event repeatedly) and interference (encountering the same picture in a different location). Memory for the context of emotional items was less likely to be corrected when erroneous and was less likely to be correctly updated when the context changed. These results suggest that initial item-context binding is more tenacious for emotional items than for neutral items, even when such binding is incorrect.

Figure 1

Mean number of location recall errors for emotional and for neutral pictures across four learning blocks. There was a significant arousal-by-block interaction where initially, there was no significant difference in recall errors between emotional and neutral pictures, but in blocks 2, 3 and 4 participants made more errors recalling emotional picture locations than neutral picture locations.

Figure 2

Mean number of location recall errors for emotional and for neutral pictures in the two blocks prior to half of the pictures changing locations and in the two blocks after the switch. There was a significant interaction where recall of the new locations of emotional pictures was worse after the switch than was recall of the new locations of neutral pictures.