Abstract
Showing an emotional item in a neutral background scene often leads to enhanced memory for the emotional item and impaired associative memory for background details. Meanwhile, both top–down goal relevance and bottom–up perceptual features played important roles in memory binding. We conducted two experiments and aimed to further examine the effects of goal relevance and perceptual features on emotional items and associative memory. By manipulating goal relevance (asking participants to categorize only each item image as living or non-living or to categorize each whole composite picture consisted of item image and background scene as natural scene or manufactured scene) and perceptual features (controlling visual contrast and visual familiarity) in two experiments, we found that both high goal relevance and salient perceptual features (high salience of items vs. high familiarity of items) could promote emotional item memory, but they had different effects on associative memory for emotional items and neutral backgrounds. Specifically, high goal relevance and high perceptual-salience of items could jointly impair the associative memory for emotional items and neutral backgrounds, while the effect of item familiarity on associative memory for emotional items would be modulated by goal relevance. High familiarity of items could increase associative memory for negative items and neutral backgrounds only in the low goal relevance condition. These findings suggest the effect of emotion on associative memory is not only related to attentional capture elicited by emotion, but also can be affected by goal relevance and perceptual features of stimulus.
Highlights
We analyzed the effect of item salience and found in the low goal relevance condition, memory performance was greater for negative high salience items compared to negative low salience items [F(1,31) = 29.18, p < 0.01, η2p = 0.49], while memory performance did not differ between negative high salience items
Item Memory We analyzed the proportion of correct responses on the item memory test from Experiment 2 (Table 3) using a 2 × 2 × 2 repeated measures ANOVA with emotion type, item familiarity and goal relevance as within-participant factors
We investigated how goal relevance and perceptual features of emotional items influenced itembackground associative memory in two experiments
Summary
Researches on individual separate item memory generally proposed that emotional events are more likely to be remembered than neutral ones (Raymark et al, 2001; Sharot et al, 2004; Mather and Knight, 2005; LaBar and Cabeza, 2006; Luminet and Curci, 2009; Zebrowitz et al, 2015; Mammarella et al, 2016a), prior studies on associative memory drew inconsistent conclusions (Doerksen and Shimamura, 2001; Madan et al, 2012; Bisby and Burgess, 2014). In their Experiment 3, they further manipulated perceptual dominance of one of two pictures and presented less interesting and less prominent background patterns paired with pictures, they found that arousing pictures would impair memory for less prominent background patterns paired with themselves This result suggested that arousing central items in scenes are more likely to impair memory for peripheral background information (Christianson et al, 1991; Hornstein et al, 2003). Kensinger et al (2007) found that participants usually showed memory enhancement in central negative items but memory impairment in surrounding backgrounds Together, this pattern of findings seems to suggest that an emotional item may not affect memory for information that is perceptually salient prominent but is likely to impair memory for information that is less perceptually prominent than itself. Besides the arousal of items, perceptual features associated with arousing items seem to play a key role
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