Preattentive processing, poststimulus elaboration, and memory for emotionally arousing stimuli.
Christianson (1992) proposed two mechanisms to explain emotionally enhanced memory: preattentive processing and poststimulus elaboration. Experiment 1 examined these processes by instructing participants to perform (1) a concurrent distractor task, (2) a continuous distractor task, or (3) both while viewing the negatively arousing, positively arousing, and neutral pictures. Recall of negatively arousing pictures showed a small decline in one of the distractor conditions, indicating that elaboration plays a minor role in remembering these pictures. Experiment 2 partially replicated Experiment 1 with an intentional learning instruction to investigate whether participants in Experiment 1 were anticipating a recall test. For all three picture types, recall declined in the continuous distractor task condition, indicating that elaboration played a role, even when the pictures were negatively arousing. Overall, these results were consistent with the notion that remembering negatively valenced stimuli is largely based on preattentive processing with a minor role played by poststimulus elaboration.
a Central Michigan University.
Mai
M
Migita
Hajime
H
Otani
Terry M
TM
Libkuman
Sonya M
SM
Sheffert
D001143:Arousal; D001288:Attention; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D011939:Mental Recall; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis
emotionally enhanced memory; poststimulus elaboration; preattentive processing