Abstract
Whilst research has largely focused on the recognition of emotional items, emotion may be a more subtle part of our surroundings and conveyed by context rather than by items. Using ERPs, we investigated which effects an arousing context during encoding may have for item-context binding and subsequent familiarity-based and recollection-based item-memory. It has been suggested that arousal could facilitate item-context bindings and by this enhance the contribution of recollection to subsequent memory judgements. Alternatively, arousal could shift attention onto central features of a scene and by this foster unitisation during encoding. This could boost the contribution of familiarity to remembering. Participants learnt neutral objects paired with ecologically highly valid emotional faces whose names later served as neutral cues during an immediate and delayed test phase. Participants identified objects faster when they had originally been studied together with emotional context faces. Items with both neutral and emotional context elicited an early frontal ERP old/new difference (200-400 ms). Neither the neurophysiological correlate for familiarity nor recollection were specific to emotionality. For the ERP correlate of recollection, we found an interaction between stimulus type and day, suggesting that this measure decreased to a larger extend on Day 2 compared with Day 1. However, we did not find direct evidence for delayed forgetting of items encoded in emotional contexts at Day 2. Emotion at encoding might make retrieval of items with emotional context more readily accessible, but we found no significant evidence that emotional context either facilitated familiarity-based or recollection-based item-memory after a delay of 24 h.
Highlights
Often, formative memories from our past tend to be very emotional, or we seem to remember emotional memories well
The present study looked at delayed contextual emotion effects on item memory to investigate which implications an arousing study context has for subsequent familiarity-based and recollection-based memory
Whereas others have previously looked at the contribution of familiarity and recollection processes to recognition memory for emotional item-context bindings (Mao et al, 2015; Ventura-Bort et al, 2016), to our knowledge this is the first study investigating lasting emotion effects of ecologically valid face expressions on subsequent item memory across two test time-points
Summary
National Foundation for Educational Research, Centre for Assessment, Slough SL1 2DQ, UK. As for emotional item-memory, Maratos and Rugg (2001) as well as Ventura-Bort et al (2016) reported larger parietal old/new effects to emotionally nonvalenced stimuli that were originally encoded together with an emotional background This can be taken as evidence that item memory for neutral objects can be influenced by emotional contexts by increasing the contribution of recollection, just as it has been proposed for emotional items. If enhanced memory for items that are integrated with their emotional contexts results from within-object binding and from unitisation during the study phase, this should be evident by modulations of the ERP measure of familiarity, i.e., the mid-frontal old/new effect. Assuming that emotional context supports within-object binding, and unitisation, it can be reasoned that this should boost memory performance by increasing the contribution of familiarity-based remembering, as reflected by modulations of the mid-frontal old/new effect. Due to a slower forgetting of emotional content as a result of amygdala-hippocampal interactions during memory formation (Yonelinas & Ritchey, 2015), we expected that the emotion effect for recollection (between-object binding) would increase after a delay of 24 hours
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