Peripheral Details Research Articles

The power of emotion versus the power of suggestion: Memory for emotional events in the misinformation paradigm.

Research has shown that emotional events are remembered better than neutral events, but might also elicit an increase in false memories. The present study was designed to disentangle the influences of valence and arousal on event memory in the misinformation paradigm. Participants were shown six types of photographs (positive with high/low arousal, negative with high/low arousal, ambiguous, neutral), after which half of them were exposed to misleading information. A recognition test assessed memory for both correct and false central and peripheral details. Negative and ambiguous events elicited fewer correct and more false memories for peripheral details than positive and neutral events, regardless of previous exposure to misinformation. Arousal improved memory for correct central details, and both negative valence and arousal inhibited control participants' tendency to endorse false central details. The power of emotion was overruled by the power of suggestion, however, as the latter effect disappeared with previous exposure to misinformation. Results are discussed in the light of earlier research on emotion and cognition, recent motivational theories, and implications for forensic practice.

Retrieval enhances eyewitness suggestibility to misinformation in free and cued recall.

Immediately recalling a witnessed event can increase people's susceptibility to later postevent misinformation. But this retrieval-enhanced suggestibility (RES) effect has been shown only when the initial recall test included specific questions that reappeared on the final test. Moreover, it is unclear whether this phenomenon is affected by the centrality of event details. These limitations make it difficult to generalize RES to criminal investigations, which often begin with free recall prior to more specific queries from legal officials and attorneys. In 3 experiments, we examined the influence of test formats (free recall vs. cued recall) and centrality of event details (central vs. peripheral) on RES. In Experiment 1, both the initial and final tests were cued recall. In Experiment 2, the initial test was free recall and the final test was cued recall. In Experiment 3, both the initial and final tests were free recall. Initial testing increased misinformation reporting on the final test for peripheral details in all experiments, but the effect was significant for central details only after aggregating the data from all 3 experiments. These results show that initial free recall can produce RES, and more broadly, that free recall can potentiate subsequent learning of complex prose materials.

Learning misinformation from fictional sources: Understanding the contributions of transportation and item-specific processing

People often pick up incorrect information about the world from movies, novels and other fictional sources. The question asked here is whether such sources are a particularly potent source of misinformation. On the one hand, story-reading involves transportation into a fictional world, with a possible reduction in access to one's prior knowledge (likely reducing the chances that the reader will notice errors). On the other hand, stories encourage relational processing as readers create mental models, decreasing the likelihood that they will encode and remember more peripheral details like erroneous facts. To test these ideas, we examined suggestibility after readers were exposed to misleading references embedded in stories and lists that were matched on a number of dimensions. In two experiments, suggestibility was greater following exposure to misinformation in a list of sentences rather than a coherent story, even though the story was rated as more engaging than the list. Furthermore, processing the story with an item-specific processing task (inserting missing letters) increased later suggestibility, whereas this task had no impact on suggestibility when misinformation was presented within a list. The type of processing used when reading a text affects suggestibility more than engagement with the text.

Conceptualizing Visual Detail: Message Structure as a Predictor of Preferential Processing

The research reported here integrates traditions of cognitive information processing and visual communication research by offering a new conceptual definition of item centrality and a methodological tool for measuring it. Using developments in information processing research about effects of visual production features on attention and memory, this article advances the proposition that these features influence the perception of some objects as central or peripheral to the information presented in a specific visual scene. These structural features were combined here to develop and test a structural indicator of item centrality. The results show that such elements as size, proximity to other objects, brightness, motion, contrast, and position on screen account for a great deal of judgment-driven evaluations about objects’ centrality. Moreover, the central and peripheral details identified using the structure-based measure replicated the same pattern of results produced in studies using a judgment-based definition. These findings suggest that structural features associated with an object are valid predictors of whether the object is perceived as central or whether it is perceived as peripheral.

Postlearning stress differentially affects memory for emotional gist and detail in naturally cycling women and women on hormonal contraceptives.

Sex differences in emotional memory have received increasing interest over the past decade. However, to date, no work has explored how a postlearning stressor might modulate the influence of sex hormone status on memory for gist and peripheral detail in an emotional versus neutral context. Here, we tested 3 predictions. First, compared with naturally cycling (NC) women in the luteal phase, women on hormonal contraception (HC) would have significantly blunted hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal reactivity to physical stress. Second, postlearning stress would enhance detail and gist memory from an emotional story in NC women, and finally, postlearning stress would not affect emotional memory for details or gist in HC women. Healthy NC and HC women viewed a brief, narrated story containing neutral or emotionally arousing elements. Immediately after, cold pressor stress (CPS) or a control procedure was administered. One week later, participants received a surprise free recall test for story elements. NC women exhibited significantly greater cortisol increases to CPS compared with HC women. NC women who viewed the emotional story and were administered CPS recalled the most peripheral details overall and more gist from the emotional compared with the neutral story. In HC women, however, the postlearning cortisol release did not affect memory for gist or peripheral details from the emotional or neutral story in any way. Additionally, NC and HC women performed similarly on measures of attention and arousal. These findings suggest that in women, postlearning stress differentially affects memory for emotional information depending on their hormonal contraceptive status.

Memory for emotionally arousing items: Context preexposure enhances subsequent context–item binding.

Emotionally arousing events are better remembered than neutral events. Not all components of these events, however, are equally well remembered and bound in memory. Although arousal enhances memory for central information, it tends to impair memory for peripheral details, referred to as central/peripheral trade-off. Therefore, people often have difficulties remembering which emotional stimuli were encountered in which contexts. The present study asked whether such context-item binding could be enhanced when individuals are familiarized with context images that later serve as background cues for emotionally arousing stimuli. Familiarization allows for context encoding prior to the encounter of emotionally arousing stimuli. Thus, only few attentional or cognitive resources may be required for context encoding when the arousing stimuli are presented, which might then allow for more efficient context-item binding. In line with this hypothesis, we show that context-item binding significantly improved under these conditions for emotionally negative stimuli. Our results suggest that context familiarity promotes context-item binding for emotional events.

Effects of Emotional Context on Memory for Details: The Role of Attention

It was repeatedly demonstrated that a negative emotional context enhances memory for central details while impairing memory for peripheral information. This trade-off effect is assumed to result from attentional processes: a negative context seems to narrow attention to central information at the expense of more peripheral details, thus causing the differential effects in memory. However, this explanation has rarely been tested and previous findings were partly inconclusive. For the present experiment 13 negative and 13 neutral naturalistic, thematically driven picture stories were constructed to test the trade-off effect in an ecologically more valid setting as compared to previous studies. During an incidental encoding phase, eye movements were recorded as an index of overt attention. In a subsequent recognition phase, memory for central and peripheral details occurring in the picture stories was tested. Explicit affective ratings and autonomic responses validated the induction of emotion during encoding. Consistent with the emotional trade-off effect on memory, encoding context differentially affected recognition of central and peripheral details. However, contrary to the common assumption, the emotional trade-off effect on memory was not mediated by attentional processes. By contrast, results suggest that the relevance of attentional processing for later recognition memory depends on the centrality of information and the emotional context but not their interaction. Thus, central information was remembered well even when fixated very briefly whereas memory for peripheral information depended more on overt attention at encoding. Moreover, the influence of overt attention on memory for central and peripheral details seems to be much lower for an arousing as compared to a neutral context.

Determining True and False Witnessed Events: Can an Eyewitness-Implicit Association Test Distinguish Between the Seen and Unseen

Despite the current popularity of indirect cognitive measures in psychology, there is a paucity of research using indirect measures in the psychology and law literature. We bridge this gap in two studies in which we tested whether a modified version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) could distinguish between seen and unseen events from a previously witnessed incident. College students (total N = 69) viewed a short crime video and completed an eyewitness-Implicit Association Test (eIAT) and recognition task. In Study 1, the eIAT and recognition task presented true and false central and peripheral details from the video. In Study 2, we used a misinformation paradigm to test the utility of the eIAT. In both studies, the eIAT successfully distinguished between witnessed and non-witnessed details. However, in Study 2, the eIAT did not improve upon the recognition task's ability to correctly classify participants (i.e., control vs. misinformed group). Implications are discussed.

The Effects of Recent Sleep Duration, Sleep Quality, and Current Sleepiness on Eyewitness Memory

SummaryThis study examined whether three sleep‐related variables (current sleepiness, the duration of the previous night's sleep and the quality of that sleep) were predictors of an eyewitness's ability to remember central and peripheral details from a crime. Participants first completed a self‐report questionnaire assessing their current sleepiness, then watched a video of a bank robbery, next completed a self‐report questionnaire about their previous night's sleep, and then had their memory of the crime tested. It was found that as the eyewitnesses' sleep quality decreased and their sleepiness increased, their ability to accurately recollect peripheral details from the crime was compromised. This is the first demonstration that variations in sleep prior to witnessing a crime, and sleepiness at the time of a crime, can predict eyewitness memory. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Sex and menstrual cycle phase at encoding influence emotional memory for gist and detail

Sex influences on emotional memory have received increasing interest over the past decade. However, only a subset of this previous work explored the influence of sex on memory for central information (gist) and peripheral detail in emotional versus neutral contexts. Here we examined the influence of sex and menstrual cycle phase at encoding on memory for either an emotional or neutral story, specifically with respect to the retention of gist and peripheral detail. Healthy naturally cycling women and men viewed a brief, narrated, three-phase story containing neutral or emotionally arousing elements. One week later, participants received a surprise free recall test for story elements. The results indicate that naturally cycling women in the luteal (high hormone) phase of the menstrual cycle at encoding show enhanced memory for peripheral details, but not gist, when in the emotional compared with neutral stories (p<.05). In contrast, naturally cycling women in the follicular (low hormone) phase of the menstrual cycle at encoding did not show enhanced memory for gist or peripheral details in the emotional compared with neutral stories. Men show enhanced memory for gist, but not peripheral details, in the emotional versus neutral stories (p<.05). In addition, these sex influences on memory cannot be attributed to differences in attention or arousal; luteal women, follicular women, and men performed similarly on measures of attention (fixation time percentage) and arousal (pupil diameter changes) during the most arousing phase of the emotional story. These findings suggest that sex and menstrual cycle phase at encoding influence long term memory for different types of emotional information.

Gun Focus Effect Revisited II

Studies have consistently found that arousal is associated with enhanced recognition and recall. In these studies, the influence of participant sex was unexamined. However, motivational theories of emotion predict evolutionarily bound emotional experiences with specific mediated content which vary between men and women. This study draws upon motivational theories of emotion and recent evidence from neuroimaging research to examine comprehensive effects of message arousal and emotional tone on memory for message detail as a function of sex. Female participants showed an advantage in processing peripheral detail when information was positive and when questions about details were in a verbal cued recall format. Male participants were immune to memory narrowing for highly arousing negative content when questions about details were posed in a visual recognition task format.

Linking enhancing and impairing effects of emotion-the case of PTSD.

As illustrated by the present Research Topic, emotion that can either enhance or hinder various aspects of our cognition and behavior. For instance, the emotional charge of an event can increase attention to and memory for that event (Dolcos et al., 2012), whereas task-irrelevant emotional information may lead to increased distraction away from goal-relevant tasks (Iordan et al., 2013; see also Dolcos et al., 2011). Interestingly, sometimes these opposing effects of emotion co-occur. For example, hearing a gunshot may enhance memory for central aspects of what was happening at the time, while impairing memory for peripheral details (Christianson, 1992). It is also possible that increased distraction from ongoing goals produced by task-irrelevant emotional stimuli may lead to better memory for the distracting information itself. The co-occurrence of enhancing and impairing effects of emotion is probably most evident in affective disorders, where both of these opposing effects are exacerbated. Specifically, uncontrolled recollection of and rumination on distressing memories observed in depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may also lead to impaired cognition due to enhanced emotional distraction. Here, we illustrate an example based on evidence from studies of PTSD, pointing to the importance of investigating both enhancing and impairing effects of emotion, in elucidating the nature of alterations in the way emotion interacts with cognition in clinical conditions.

Cecil the Pet Glacier (review)

Reviewed by: Cecil the Pet Glacier Jeannette Hulick Harvey, Matthea . Cecil the Pet Glacier; illus. by Giselle Potter. Schwartz & Wade, 2012. [40p]. Library ed. ISBN 978-0-375-96773-3 $20.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-375-86773-6 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R 6-9 yrs. Ruby Small's parents are embarrassingly unusual: Dad creates topiary while Mom designs tiaras, and the two love tangoing in the front yard and playing miniature Ping-Pong on the tray tables during an airplane flight. When a small glacier "calf " (the technical term for a chunk of ice that falls off of a glacier) begins following Ruby on a family trip to Norway, her parents are delighted that she's found a pet. Even after the family takes him home (safely ensconced in a snazzy red Igloo cooler), Ruby is less than thrilled with Cecil. It is only when Cecil, at great risk to himself, retrieves one of her beloved dolls in a downpour on the playground that Ruby warms to her strange icy pet. Harvey's narrative is at once absurd and wry, and [End Page 85] even the peripheral details of Ruby's story are amusing ("Mrs. Small piled fifteen hatboxes into the car—she didn't like to repeat tiaras even on vacation"). While kids embarrassed by their parents will sympathize with Ruby, Cecil is amazingly endearing for a lump of rocky ice, and Ruby's initial cold-shouldering will earn him sympathy. Potter's trademark folk-art-style watercolor illustrations (in blues, greens, and golden browns, with pops of red) are effective in their pairing with this strange little story; while the slightly surreal quality of her paintings is well matched to the text's odd subject matter, the straight-faced approach of the illustrations lends a bit of gravitas to the amusingly bizarre narrative. Use this to spice up a pet-themed storytime or classroom unit, or simply share it aloud with kids who will appreciate its particular brand of weirdness. Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Iconografía de "La Dormición" de la Virgen en los siglos X-XII. Análisis a partir de sus fuentes legendarias

This article aims to highlight if and to what extent the medieval iconography of the Dormition of the Virgin reflects the central or peripheral details of three apocryphal texts, written by the Pseudo John the Theologian, the archbishop John of Thessalonica and the Pseudo Joseph of Arimathea. Thus, we will put in direct relation the narrative details of these three apocryphal legends with the persons, the gestures, the actions, and the circumstances shaped in the most outstanding Byzantine and western representations of this iconographic subject during the 10th-12th centuries.

Emotional Memory for Central and Peripheral Details in Children with Callous‐Unemotional Traits

A limited number of studies have shown that adults and adolescents with psychopathic traits suffer from emotional memory impairment. The present study examined whether this finding could be replicated in a sample of children between 8 and 12 years of age with callous-unemotional (CU) traits. Children with high CU traits (n=24) were compared with children with low CU traits (n=18) with regard to performance on a peripheral memory recognition test that examined memory for central and peripheral components of neutral and negative pictures. Results showed that overall recognition rates did not differ between the high- and low-CU groups. For negative pictures, both groups demonstrated better recognition of the central component at the expense of the peripheral component, while for neutral pictures, the peripheral component was better recognized than the central component. This study is the first to demonstrate that children with high CU traits do not suffer from an impaired emotional memory.

Motivation Matters: Differing Effects of Pre-Goal and Post-Goal Emotions on Attention and Memory

People often show enhanced memory for information that is central to emotional events and impaired memory for peripheral details. The intensity of arousal elicited by an emotional event is commonly held to be the mechanism underlying memory narrowing, with the implication that all sources of emotional arousal should have comparable effects. Discrete emotions differ in their effects on memory, however, with some emotions broadening rather than narrowing the range of information attended to and remembered. Thus, features of emotion other than arousal appear to play a critical role in memory narrowing. We review theory and research on emotional memory narrowing and argue that motivation matters. Recent evidence suggests that emotions experienced prior to goal attainment or loss lead to memory narrowing whereas emotions experienced after goal attainment or loss broaden the range of information encoded in memory. The motivational component of emotion is an important but understudied feature that can help to clarify the conditions under which emotions enhance and impair attention and memory.

Gentlemen and Gentle Women: The Landscape Ethos in Millenium Hall

The rural landscape in Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall is not simply the setting but rather a way of seeing the world that the novel scrutinizes. This article synthesizes various readings of landscape in Scott's novel in order to assert its construction of a landscape ethos that encompasses ethical, aesthetic, and economic experience. Drawing on cultural geography and art history, I assess the relationship between the novel's content and form and argue that peripheral details contribute to its larger textual landscape, thus giving rise to the ethos in question. This formal analysis exposes the conservatism of the novel's social and gender politics. The landscape ethos unites the female inhabitants of the Hall with their male visitors, naturalizing their shared gentility and rendering their social privilege more stable even as the seemingly more urgent concern—women's vulnerability—eludes the narrator's grasp.

Encoding details: Positive emotion leads to memory broadening

In the current experiment we tested the hypothesis that unlike negative arousal, which leads to memory narrowing effects whereby an increase in memory for the central details is accompanied by a decrease in memory for the peripheral details, positive arousing events might lead to a memory broadening effect such that positive arousal would increase memory for both central and peripheral details. This was assessed by testing recognition for central and peripheral details of pictures that were selected to vary in a continuous manner across a wide range of arousal for both positive and negative items. The results indicated that increases in both positive and negative stimulus arousal levels led to gradual increases in memory for the central aspects of the photos. In contrast, negative arousal first increased then decreased memory for peripheral detail as arousal levels increased, whereas positive arousal led to a continuous increase in memory for peripheral details. Thus, arousing negative materials lead to memory narrowing, whereas arousing positive materials can lead to memory broadening.

Memory for emotional events: The accuracy of central and peripheral details

The emotional intensity of an event is a significant predictor for vividness of event memory. Nevertheless, during the last few decades, there has been some confusion in literature as to whether emotional events are poorly or well retained. It is important to consider that not all details of emotional events are equally remembered: Memory for the central details seems to be relatively good, whereas memory for peripheral details appears to be relatively poor. The aim of the present study was to investigate the accuracy of central vs. peripheral details of an emotional event in a natural but controlled context: the emotional event is a simulated life event, the central and peripheral details of the emotional event were controlled. Indeed previous research work was simply based on the induction of an emotional state in an experimental context and subsequent assessment of a performance memory task. Results showed that, following an emotional event, individuals provided a vivid and accurate recollection not only of the central gist of the event, but also of the context and peripheral details. Implications for literature on emotional autobiographical memories were discussed.

Gun Focus Effect Revisited

This study attempts to clarify the relationship between message emotional tone and memory vividness, specifically gun focus effect. Based on findings in neuroimaging research, it is claimed here that positive and negative messages trigger different processing mechanisms in the brain and therefore later detail retrieval is dependent on the degree to which the same processing paths are activated. Overall, data support an assumption that visual recognition aids negative arousing content detail memory more than positive. In contrast, cued recall procedure is more helpful for recalling positive detail. For central detail the matching cues work together with the arousing content to boost memory specificity. Yet for peripheral detail, the matching cues help overcome the harmful effects of arousing content by reducing forgetting. Thus visual recognition minimizes gun focus effect for negative visual content and enhances it for positive. At the same time, a cued recall task minimizes gun focus effect for positive visual content and enhances it for negative.