The contribution of relatedness and distinctiveness to emotionally-enhanced memory

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Abstract

Emotional events are more organized and distinctive than neutral events. We asked whether organization and distinctiveness can account for emotionally-enhanced memory. To examine organization, we compared memory for arousing, negatively-valenced pictures, and inter-related neutral pictures. To examine distinctiveness, we manipulated list composition, and compared mixed lists, which contained emotional and neutral items, to pure lists, which contained only items of a single type and removed the relative-distinctiveness advantage of emotional items. We show that emotional memory is enhanced in immediate memory tests as long as either organization or distinctiveness is allowed to play a role. When these effects are removed, in the comparison of emotional and related neutral items in pure lists, the emotional memory advantage is eliminated. Examining the contribution of mediating cognitive factors at a behavioral and neural level is crucial if we are to understand how emotion influences memory.

Section snippets

Emotion and organization

Emotional items are related because they share category membership and a thematic relationship (the words “torture” and “pain”, a picture of a gun and a picture of a dead body). Recently, we have shown that enhanced memory for emotional words, which was present in the comparison with randomly-selected neutral words, was eliminated in the comparison with equally related neutral words (Talmi & Moscovitch, 2004). Since relatedness itself can enhance memory by improving list organization at

Emotion and distinctiveness

Emotional items are not only organized better than neutral items, but also are more distinct in both an ‘absolute’ and a ‘relative’ sense. Schmidt, 1991, Hunt and McDaniel, 1993 defines absolute (‘secondary’) distinctiveness as the result of the limited overlap of the features of the item (e.g. an image of a hungry child) with the ‘active conceptual framework’, a term used to define the typical items that are stored pre-experimentally in long-term memory (e.g. neutral images of people,

Experiment 1

In Experiment 1, participants studied three pure lists of emotional, random neutral, and related neutral items, or three mixed list that combined all these item types. Memory was tested after a 1-min filled interval. We predicted that regardless of list composition, because of their higher relatedness, emotional items would be recalled better than random neutral items, thereby replicating the classic effect. If negative emotion improves memory in addition to its effect on relatedness, memory

Experiment 2A

The non-significant trends in Experiment 1 towards better memory for emotional over related-neutral pictures, and related over random-neutral pictures, suggested that some participants might (i) not realize that the neutral items belong to an ad-hoc category, or (ii) need some experience with the memory task, before they are able to utilize item inter-relatedness to encode and retrieve pictorial stimuli optimally. Failure of participants to take advantage of item-relatedness in the neutral set

Experiment 2B

Since the extension of the practice phase had a strong impact on performance in Experiment 2A, we designed Experiment 2B to ensure that the effects we obtained in the mixed list condition in Experiment 1 would also be replicated with the procedures used in Experiment 2A.

Experiment 3

The higher distinctiveness of emotional items may improve memory because it evokes special encoding processes (McDaniel et al., 2005, Schmidt, 1991). For instance, distinct items could attract attention, and enhanced attentional allocation to unusual items at encoding has been used to explain why they are remembered better (Jenkins & Postman, 1948). Similarly, the higher distinctiveness of emotional items could lead to increased processing of the encoding context (e.g. MacKay et al., 2004),

Experiment 4

In Experiment 4, we equated the frequency of participants’ encounter with related-neutral and negative themes by using the same domestic-scene category during both practice and experimental phases. If the less-frequent report of the related-neutral theme was dependent on this procedural detail, participants should now report it as frequently as the emotional theme. We predicted, however, that the less-frequent report of the related-neutral theme reflects the more volitional and effortful nature

General discussion

The experiments reported here consistently demonstrated that controlling the differences in relatedness and relative distinctiveness between emotional and neutral items eliminated the significant immediate memory advantage emotional items had over neutral ones when those factors were not controlled. The analysis across all four experiments ascertained that the critical null effect in the comparison between pure lists of emotional and related-neutral items is of negligible magnitude, and even

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by NSERC Grant # CFC 205055 Fund 454119 to Morris Moscovitch. The authors thank Joseph J. Williams for his assistance with scoring, Marty Niewiadomski, for his feedback on the analysis of Experiment 3, and Elisa Ciaramelli and Nachshon Meiran for reading a previous draft of this manuscript, and Marilyne Ziegler for excellent technical support.

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