Distinct signatures of social and emotional cues in memory and eye movements

Negative emotional stimuli are associated with increased recognition accuracy but decreased memory for the associative context, an effect coined as "tunnel memory" (Steinmetz & Kensinger, 2013). Recently, Stewardson et al. (2023) found that social cues enhance both recognition and associative memory and weaken the effects of negative emotion on memory, suggesting potentially distinct mechanisms underlying how adaptively relevant information is processed and retained when social cues are present. In this study (conducted in 2023-2024), we sought to replicate these findings and use eye tracking to explore attention as a mechanism underlying this divergence. As predicted, both negative images and social cues enhanced recognition memory, with differential effects on associative memory (diminishing for negative, enhancing for social). Negative pictures with few social cues were associated with a "tunneling" of both memory and attention, that is, better recognition but poorer associative memory alongside more frequent, longer fixations on the picture and reduced picture-object saccades. By contrast, social cues led to a partial tunneling of attention-that is, more frequent but shorter fixations and fewer linking saccades-and yet enhanced both picture recognition and associative memory. Perhaps most striking, negative emotion's effects on memory and attention were significantly attenuated when social cues were present. These findings suggest that differences in how negative versus neutral content is processed and retained depend on the social context. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).