Work

Negative arousal amplifies the effects of saliency in short-term memory.

Year: 2012

Type: article

Abstract: Evidence from 2 experiments suggests that negative arousal increases biases in attention that result from differences in visual salience. Participants were exposed to negative arousing or neutral sounds before briefly viewing an array of letters. They reported as many of the letters as they could, and attention was biased to certain letters by increasing salience through visual contrast. Regardless of the type of sound heard, participants were more likely to recall high-salience letters than low-salience letters. However, on arousing trials recall of high-salience letters increased, while recall of low-salience letters did not. These findings indicate that negative emotional arousal increases the selectivity of attention, and provides evidence for arousal-biased competition theory (Mather & Sutherland, 2011), which predicts that emotional arousal enhances representations of stimuli that have priority.

Source: Emotion

DOI: 10.1037/a0027860

Authors: Matthew R. Sutherland, Mara Mather

Institution: University of Southern California

Language: English

Topic: Memory Processes and Influences

Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience

Field: Neuroscience

Domain: Life Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Aging

Awards: G1583786880, G7467113889, Emotion-cognition interactions and aging, Multidisciplinary Research Training in Gerontology