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Abstract
Emotional cues can guide selective attention processes. However, emotional stimuli can both activate long-term memory representations reflecting general world knowledge and engage newly formed memory representations representing specific knowledge from the immediate past. Here, the self-completion feature of associative memory was utilized to assess the regulation of attention processes by newly-formed emotional memory. First, new memory representations were formed by presenting pictures depicting a person either in an erotic pose or as a portrait. Afterwards, to activate newly-built memory traces, edited pictures were presented showing only the head region of the person. ERP recordings revealed the emotional regulation of attention by newly-formed memories. Specifically, edited pictures from the erotic compared to the portrait category elicited an early posterior negativity and late positive potential, similar to the findings observed for the original pictures. A control condition showed that the effect was dependent on newly-formed memory traces. Given the large number of new memories formed each day, they presumably make an important contribution to the regulation of attention in everyday life.
Highlights
While prototypical emotional stimuli representing general world knowledge may be formed slowly and over extended periods of time, emotional networks can be formed quickly
Forming memory representations by stimulus exposure facilitates recognition of fragments or partially occluded objects in the absence of intention and explicit task instructions[24,25,26,27]. We apply this approach to the emotion domain and present partial input to ensure that emotional attention effects reflect newly-formed rather than old memories
A control condition assured that this effect, predicted for previously ‘seen’ partial images, involved memory processes: the Early posterior negativity (EPN) and Late positive potential (LPP) component towards novel partial images, which were not seen during phase 1, should not differ between the erotic and portrait picture categories
Summary
While prototypical emotional stimuli representing general world knowledge may be formed slowly and over extended periods of time, emotional networks can be formed quickly. Forming memory representations by stimulus exposure facilitates recognition of fragments or partially occluded objects in the absence of intention and explicit task instructions[24,25,26,27] We apply this approach to the emotion domain and present partial input to ensure that emotional attention effects reflect newly-formed rather than old memories. To form new memory representations, erotic and portrait pictures were repeatedly presented in a passive viewing task For this first phase, we predicted larger EPN and LPP amplitudes to erotic images. According to the hypothesis that newly-formed emotion networks can guide attention processes, partial stimuli from the erotic stimulus category were predicted to elicit larger EPN and LPP components as compared to the portrait category. A control condition assured that this effect, predicted for previously ‘seen’ partial images, involved memory processes: the EPN and LPP component towards novel partial images, which were not seen during phase 1, should not differ between the erotic and portrait picture categories
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