Neutral details associated with emotional events are encoded: evidence from a cued recall paradigm.

ABSTRACT: Enhanced emotional memory often comes at the cost of memory for surrounding background information. Narrowed-encoding theories suggest that this is due to narrowed attention for emotional information at encoding, leading to impaired encoding of background information. Recent work has suggested that an encoding-based theory may be insufficient. Here, we examined whether cued recall-instead of previously used recognition memory tasks-would reveal evidence that non-emotional information associated with emotional information was effectively encoded. Participants encoded positive, negative, or neutral objects on neutral backgrounds. At retrieval, they were given either the item or the background as a memory cue and were asked to recall the associated scene element. Counter to narrowed-encoding

SUBMITTER: Mickley Steinmetz KR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4732930 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature