Abstract
This study investigated the modulatory role of emotion in the effect of time delay on recognition memory for pictures. Participants viewed neutral, positive and negative pictures, and took a recognition memory test 5 minutes, 24 hours, or 1 week after learning. The findings are: 1) For neutral, positive and negative pictures, overall recognition accuracy in the 5-min delay did not significantly differ from that in the 24-h delay. For neutral and positive pictures, overall recognition accuracy in the 1-week delay was lower than in the 24-h delay; for negative pictures, overall recognition in the 24-h and 1-week delay did not significantly differ. Therefore negative emotion modulates the effect of time delay on recognition memory, maintaining retention of overall recognition accuracy only within a certain frame of time. 2) For the three types of pictures, recollection and familiarity in the 5-min delay did not significantly differ from that in the 24-h and the 1-week delay. Thus emotion does not appear to modulate the effect of time delay on recollection and familiarity. However, recollection in the 24-h delay was higher than in the 1-week delay, whereas familiarity in the 24-h delay was lower than in the 1-week delay.
Highlights
How does time delay affect memory retention? Ebbinghaus [1] discovered that forgetting rate was very high within 20 minutes after initial learning but leveled off when the retention interval reached 9 hours
Modulatory role of emotion in the effect of time delay on recognition memory Despite the ongoing debates concerning the mechanisms underlying the influence of emotion on memory retention, one theory posits that emotionally arousing experiences lead to release of stress hormones and activation of other neuromodulatory systems, which converge to regulate noradrenaline-receptor activity within the basolateral region of the amygdala (BLA); through BLA projections to other brain areas including the hippocampus, the amygdala plays a role in modulating consolidation of hippocampus-dependent memory [16]
The current study investigated the modulation of emotion in the retention of recognition memory for pictures as a function of time delay
Summary
How does time delay affect memory retention? Ebbinghaus [1] discovered that forgetting rate was very high within 20 minutes after initial learning but leveled off when the retention interval reached 9 hours. Far in the several studies examining the modulatory role of emotion in the effect of time delay on recognition memory, only negatively arousing stimuli and neutral stimuli were used [18,19], leaving it impossible to know whether the effect of emotion can be modulated by valence. Prior studies have examined the modulatory roles of arousal predisposition, emotion suppression and reappraisal in the effect of post-learning emotional arousal on memory consolidation It is unclear whether the above three characteristics can modulate memory when emotional arousal is elicited during encoding by the to-be-remembered stimuli. Based on the evidence that the role of the amygdala lies in negative but not positive emotion [25,26], it was hypothesized that recognition memory for positive pictures at different time points of testing would be similar to that for neutral pictures. It was hypothesized that arousal predisposition, emotion suppression and reappraisal would modulate the interaction between emotion and time delay
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