Hearing something emotional influences memory for what was just seen: How arousal amplifies effects of competition in memory consolidation

Abstract

Enhanced memory for emotional items often comes at the cost of memory for the background scenes. Because emotional foreground items both induce arousal and attract attention, it is not clear whether the emotion effects are simply the result of shifts in visual attention during encoding or whether arousal has effects beyond simple attention capture. In the current study, participants viewed a series of scenes that each either had a foreground object or did not have one, and then, after each image, heard either an emotionally arousing negative sound or a neutral sound. After a 24-hr delay, they returned for a memory test for the objects and scenes. Postencoding arousal decreased recognition memory of scenes shown behind superimposed objects but not memory of scenes shown alone. These findings support the hypothesis that arousal amplifies the effects of competition between mental representations, influencing memory consolidation of currently active representations.

Figure 1

Figure 1A shows the trial structure. On every trial, participants were given a cue, asking them to pay attention to either a background or an object. They were then presented with either an object alone, a scene alone, or a combination (which is an object superimposed on a scene). A sound was played, and the sound was either negative or neutral. They were then given a judgment of learning question, which asked them to indicate how likely they were to remember the cued image. A jittered ITI followed, of either four seconds, six seconds, or eight seconds. Figure 1B shows that scenes presented as part of a combination had significantly lower overall (remember + know) recognition rates when followed by negative sounds than by neutral sounds (* p < .05). Emotion did not significantly influence memory for preceding solo scenes.