Variations in prestimulus neural activity predict the emotion-enhanced memory effect.
Here, we report evidence that electrophysiological neural activity preceding the onset of emotional pictures can predict whether they will be remembered or forgotten 24 h later, whereas the same effect was not observed for neutral pictures. In contrast to previous research, we observed this effect using a paradigm in which participants could not predict the emotional or the neutral content of the pictures before their onset. These effects were obtained alongside significant behavioural effects of superior recognition memory for emotional compared with neutral items. These findings suggest that the preferential encoding of emotional events in memory is determined by fluctuations in the availability of processing resources just before event onset. This explanation argues in favour of mediational models of emotional memory, which contend that emotional information is preferentially encoded because it mobilizes a greater amount of processing resources than neutral information.
aDepartment of Psychology, Durham University, Durham, UK bDepartment of Psychology, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore cInstitute of Psychology, University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil dMonash University Malaysia, School of Business, Malaysia.
Yee Ying
YY
Yick
Luciano G
LG
Buratto
Alexandre
A
Schaefer
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult