The Effects of Goal Relevance and Perceptual Features on Emotional Items and Associative Memory

The effect of part-list cuing on associative recognition

The modulation of part-list cuing on item memory has been well-documented, whereas its impact on associative memory remains largely unknown. The present study explored the effect of part-list cuing on associative recognition and, more specifically, whether this forgetting effect caused by part-list cuing is more sensitive to recollection or familiarity in recognition memory. Experiments 1a and 1b combined the intact/rearranged/new judgement task of associative recognition with the classical part-list cuing paradigm, and the result showed that part-list cuing impaired the recognition accuracy of "intact" and "rearranged" face-scene pairs. Moreover, the discriminability score of relational recognition and item recognition was significantly decreased in the part-list cuing condition compared to the no-part-list cuing condition. Experiments 2a and 2b further used the Remember/Know/Guess task to explore which recognition processes (recollection vs. familiarity) were sensitive to the presentation of part-list cuing. The results showed that part-list cuing reduced the familiarity of relational recognition and the recollection and familiarity of item recognition. These findings suggest that part-list cuing was harmful to the recognition of relationships (familiarity) and items (recollection and familiarity) in associative memory.

The effects of post-stimulus elaboration, background valence, and item salience on the emotion-induced memory trade-off

The effect of emotion on memory often leads to the trade-off: enhanced memory for emotional items comes at the cost of memory for background information. Although this effect is usually attributed to overt attention during encoding, Steinmetz and Kensinger (2013) proposed that such an effect might also be related to post-stimulus elaboration. Based on previous different viewpoints, we used the directed forgetting paradigm to further explore the effect of post-stimulus elaboration on the memory trade-off. In the meantime, we also tested the roles of background valence and item salience (high salient items were placed in the centre of backgrounds while low salient items were placed in the periphery of backgrounds) in modulating the memory trade-off. Our results showed that there was a memory trade-off when backgrounds were neutral, whereas this was no longer the case when backgrounds were negative. This indicated the memory trade-off might be affected by background valence. Meanwhile, we found post-stimulus elaboration contributed to selective memory enhancement for backgrounds, while item salience enhanced item memory performance in the memory trade-off. These findings suggest the emotion-induced memory trade-off may be a complex memory effect, which can be influenced by different factors to varying degrees.

Affect enhances object-background associations: evidence from behaviour and mathematical modelling

In recognition memory paradigms, emotional details are often recognised better than neutral ones, but at the cost of memory for peripheral details. We previously provided evidence that, when peripheral details must be recalled using central details as cues, peripheral details from emotional scenes are at least as likely to be recalled as those from neutral scenes. Here we replicated and explicated this result by implementing a mathematical modelling approach to disambiguate the influence of target type, scene emotionality, scene valence, and their interactions. After incidentally encoding scenes that included neutral backgrounds with a positive, negative, or neutral foreground objects, participants showed equal or better cued recall of components from emotional scenes compared to neutral scenes. There was no evidence of emotion-based impairment in cued recall in either of two experiments, including one in which we replicated the emotion-induced memory trade-off in recognition. Mathematical model fits indicated that the emotionality of the encoded scene was the primary driver of improved cued-recall performance. Thus, even when emotion impairs recognition of peripheral components of scenes, it can preserve the ability to recall which scene components were studied together.