Abstract
Emotional events are thought to have privileged access to attention and memory, consuming resources needed to encode competing emotionally neutral stimuli. However, it is not clear whether this detrimental effect is automatic or depends on the successful maintenance of the specific emotional object within working memory. Here, participants viewed everyday scenes including an emotional object among other neutral objects followed by a free-recollection task. Results showed that emotional objects—irrespective of their perceptual saliency—were recollected more often than neutral objects. The probability of being recollected increased as a function of the arousal of the emotional objects, specifically for negative objects. Successful recollection of emotional objects (positive or negative) from a scene reduced the overall number of recollected neutral objects from the same scene. This indicates that only emotional stimuli that are efficient in grabbing (and then consuming) available attentional resources play a crucial role during the encoding of competing information, with a subsequent bias in the recollection of neutral representations.
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Notes
It is worth noting here that assessing how many objects are included in a commonplace scene is not a trivial issue, since this depends on the definition of what constitutes an “object”. For example, when a picture contains a car, should the car be considered as a single object or should all single components (wheels, license plate, mirror, etc.) be counted as distinct objects? Here we address this problem—at least to some extent—by relying on a subjective measure, that is, on the number of objects successfully reported by participants during the time-constrained scene exploration (4 s).
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The study has been partially funded by the Russian Academic Excellence Project ‘5-100’.
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Handling editor: Narayanan Srinivasan (University of Allahabad).
Reviewers: Adrian von Muhlenen (University of Warwick), Justin Storbeck (City University of New York), Frances Maratos (University of Derby).
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Buttafuoco, A., Pedale, T., Buchanan, T.W. et al. Only “efficient” emotional stimuli affect the content of working memory during free-recollection from natural scenes. Cogn Process 19, 125–132 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-017-0846-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-017-0846-1