Abstract
Neural evidence for the strategic retrieval of task-relevant ‘target’ memories at the expense of less relevant ‘nontarget’ memories has been demonstrated across a wide variety of studies. In ERP studies, this evidence consists of the ERP correlate of recollection (i.e. the ‘left parietal old/new effect’) being evident for targets and attenuated for nontargets. It is not yet known, however, whether this degree of strategic control can be extended to emotionally valenced words, or whether these items instead reactivate associated memories. The present study used a paradigm previously employed to demonstrate the strategic retrieval of neutral words (Herron & Rugg, Psychonomic Bulletin and & Review, 10(3), 703-–710, 2003b) to assess the effects of stimulus valence on behavioural and event-related potential (ERP) measures of strategic retrieval. While response accuracy and reaction times associated with targets were unaffected by valence, negative nontargets and new items were both associated with an elevated false alarm rate and longer RTs than their neutral equivalents. Both neutral and negative targets and nontargets elicited early old/new effects between 300 and 500 ms. Critically, whereas neutral and negative targets elicited robust and statistically equivalent left parietal old/new effects between 500 and 800 ms, these were absent for neutral and negative nontargets. A right frontal positivity associated with postretrieval monitoring was evident for neutral targets versus nontargets, for negative versus neutral nontargets, and for targets versus new items. It can therefore be concluded that the recollection of negatively valenced words is subject to strategic control during retrieval, and that postretrieval monitoring processes are influenced by emotional valence.
Highlights
Neural evidence for the strategic retrieval of taskrelevant ‘target’ memories at the expense of less relevant ‘nontarget’ memories has been demonstrated across a wide variety of studies
The principal aim of this study is to examine whether emotionally arousing negative stimuli are subject to these strategic retrieval control processes, and whether recollection of these items can be attenuated when designated as nontargets
Maratos et al (2000) reported that two established event-related potential (ERP) correlates of recognition memory were qualitatively the same for negative and for neutral words; an early frontal effect (300–500 ms) associated with familiarity-based recognition was unaffected by valence, while an effect at left parietal sites (500–800 ms) associated with recollection was smaller in size for negative than for neutral items
Summary
Neural evidence for the strategic retrieval of taskrelevant ‘target’ memories at the expense of less relevant ‘nontarget’ memories has been demonstrated across a wide variety of studies. This concept has been expressed within cognitive theories of memory in various ways, such as ‘descriptors’ that guide a memory search (Burgess & Shallice, 1996), ‘context bias’ mechanisms that influence the processing of stimuli so as to facilitate retrieval from a particular context (Anderson & Bjork, 1994), cue-bias processes that optimise the cuememory trace by specifying relevant contextual features (Mecklinger, 2010), and ‘retrieval orientations’ that guide retrieval searches towards specific contexts (Rugg & Wilding, 2000) Supporting these theories, a significant number of event-related potential (ERP) recognition memory studies have provided evidence that established neural correlates of recollection are evident for ‘target’ test items that were studied in an experimenter-designated encoding context, whereas these are attenuated or even eliminated for ‘nontarget’ items studied in an alternative context (Dywan, Segalowitz, & Arsenault, 2002; Dywan, Segalowitz, & Webster, 1998; Dzulkiflil, Herron, & Wilding, 2006; Evans, Wilding, Hibbs, & Herron, 2010; Herron & Rugg, 2003a, 2003b; Rosburg, Johansson, & Mecklinger, 2013; Rosburg, Mecklinger, & Johansson, 2011; Wilding, Fraser, & Herron, 2005). The authors proposed that the superior recognition memory observed for negative words could be attributed to this ERP enhancement for recognised items
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