Examining Differences in Forgetting in Cued Recall for Emotional and Neutral Pictures Open Access

Abstract

Memories for emotionally arousing events and stimuli are often enhanced compared to neutral ones, an effect known as the emotional enhancement of memory (EEM). Memory for emotional stimuli is also often more persistent and exhibits slower forgetting relative to neutral stimuli. Evidence for slower forgetting for emotional stimuli comes primarily from studies of recognition memory, yet relatively little is known about this issue from studies using recall tasks. The EEM effect is typically larger and emotional memories may be more persistent when memory is assessed with recall tasks than recognition tasks, which could reflect the greater role of recollection processes in recall. The goal of the current study was to examine forgetting for emotional (positive and negative) and neutral picture stimuli using a cued recall paradigm to determine whether slower forgetting would be observed for positive and negative stimuli relative to neutral stimuli. We also examined the role of semantic similarity, a specific factor thought to modulate both EEM and slowed forgetting. In the present study, participants encoded neutral, negative, and positive pictures matched on average semantic similarity and then cued recall for subsets of the pictures was tested at a short, 20-minute, and long, 24-hour, delay. An EEM effect was found at both delays for low and high arousal negative pictures, but no EEM effect was observed for positive pictures. Slowed forgetting was only found for high arousal negative pictures compared to neutral pictures. The presence of an EEM effect for the negative pictures and slowed forgetting for the high arousal negative pictures, but no EEM or slowed forgetting for positive pictures highlights the importance of stimulus valence in emotional memory and forgetting. Because slowed forgetting was still observed when semantic similarity was controlled between the negative and neutral conditions, this suggests that semantic similarity alone cannot account for the EEM effect or slowed forgetting. The current findings contribute to the understanding of the effects of valence, arousal, and semantic similarity in emotional memory and forgetting for emotional stimuli in cued recall tasks.

Table of Contents

Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1

Methods ......................................................................................................................................... 10

            Participants .......................................................................................................................... 10

            Stimuli Selection ................................................................................................................... 10

            Study Design ......................................................................................................................... 13

                        Figure 1: Schematic of the encoding and retrieval phases ................................................ 15

            Scoring Procedure .................................................................................................................. 16

            Statistical Analysis ................................................................................................................. 17

Results ............................................................................................................................................ 18

            Ratings .................................................................................................................................. 18

                        Table 1: Average valence, arousal, and cue efficacy ratings ............................................... 19

            Cued Recall Performance ......................................................................................................... 20

                        Figure 2: Cued recall task results .................................................................................... 21

                        Figure 3: Proportional forgetting results ......................................................................... 22

            Split Arousal Analysis .............................................................................................................. 22

                        Table 2: Average valence, arousal, and cue efficacy ratings split by arousal ......................... 23

                        Figure 4: Cued recall task results split by arousal .............................................................. 26

                        Figure 5: Proportional forgetting results split by arousal ................................................... 27

            Correlations between sleep measures and forgetting ................................................................... 27

Discussion ......................................................................................................................................... 28

References ......................................................................................................................................... 35

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology
Degree	B.S.
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Psychology, Cognitive
Keyword	recollection semantic relatedness cued recall emotion forgetting memory
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Hamann, Stephan, Emory University
Committee Members	Roesch, Leah, Emory University Kim, Yun, Emory University

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