The tenacious nature of memory binding for arousing negative items.

Full Abstract

In two experiments, we investigated whether people are better or worse at updating memory for the location of emotional pictures than of neutral pictures. We measured participants' memories for the locations of both arousing negative pictures and neutral pictures while manipulating practice (encountering the same event repeatedly) and interference (encountering the same picture in a different location). Memory for the context of emotional items was less likely to be corrected when erroneous and was less likely to be correctly updated when the context changed. These results suggest that initial item-context binding is more tenacious for emotional items than for neutral items, even when such binding is incorrect.

Author information

Author/s: Novak, Deanna L (DL); Mather, Mara (M);

Affiliation: University of California, Santa Cruz, California, USA.

Grants: AG025340 (Agency:NIA NIH HHS) ; R01 AG025340-05 (Agency:NIA NIH HHS)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

Journal: Memory & cognition (Mem Cognit), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2009-Oct; vol 37 (issue 7) : pp 945-52

Dates: Created 2009/09/11; Completed 2009/11/02;

PMID: 19744934, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/2/2009, IMS Date: )

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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