title: Emotional stimuli exert parallel effects on attention and memory.
abstract: Because emotional and neutral stimuli typically differ on non-emotional dimensions, it has been difficult to determine conclusively which factors underlie the ability of emotional stimuli to enhance immediate long-term memory. Here we induced arousal by varying participants' goals, a method that removes many potential confounds between emotional and non-emotional items. Hungry and sated participants encoded food and clothing images under divided attention conditions. Sated participants attended to and recalled food and clothing images equivalently. Hungry participants performed worse on the concurrent tone-discrimination task when they viewed food relative to clothing images, suggesting enhanced attention to food images, and they recalled more food than clothing images. A follow-up regression analysis of the factors predicting memory for individual pictures revealed that food images had parallel effects on attention and memory in hungry participants, so that enhanced attention to food images did not predict their enhanced memory. We suggest that immediate long-term memory for food is enhanced in the hungry state because hunger leads to more distinctive processing of food images rendering them more accessible during retrieval.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester M139PL, UK. deborah.talmi@manchester.ac.uk
authors.forename: Deborah
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Talmi
authors.forename: Marilyne
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ziegler
authors.forename: Jade
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hawksworth
authors.forename: Safina
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lalani
authors.forename: C Peter
authors.initials: CP
authors.lastname: Herman
authors.forename: Morris
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Moscovitch
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001143:Arousal; D001288:Attention; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D006815:Hunger; D008297:Male; D057567:Memory, Long-Term; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D012527:Satiation