Emotional arousal influences remembrance of goal-relevant stimuli

Emotional stimuli rarely occur in isolation; instead, they often cluster with nearby neutral items in time and space. Research suggests that emotional arousal at encoding strengthens memory retention for temporally adjacent goal-relevant neutral stimuli. It is an open question whether these emotion-induced enhancement effects are the same for spatially adjacent stimuli. The present study examined how emotional arousal influenced memory of temporally or spatially adjacent goal-relevant neutral items. In Experiment 1, two stimuli were presented consecutively as a temporally adjacent pair during the study phase, with a neutral-test stimulus paired with either a negative or neutral bystander stimulus. Participants were instructed to attend to the neutral-test stimulus in the goal-relevant condition and to the bystander stimulus in the goal-irrelevant condition. The method for Experiment 2 was similar to Experiment 1 except that the two stimuli were presented simultaneously during the study, so that they were spatially rather than temporally adjacent. Memory performance was measured for neutral-test items using a recognition test with a remember-know paradigm. Emotional arousal at encoding enhanced the remembrance of temporally adjacent goal-relevant neutral stimuli but impaired the remembrance of spatially adjacent goal-relevant neutral stimuli. Using a similar procedure, Experiment 3 collected behavioral data from two samples for temporally and spatially adjacent conditions and replicated the results of Experiments 1 and 2. The effects of emotional arousal on remembrance of goal-relevant neutral items double dissociated for temporally and spatially adjacent conditions support that arousal-biased competition amplifies the effects of goal relevance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).