Oh, it's you again: Memory interference from irrelevant emotional and neutral faces

Abstract

In two experiments, repeated runs of a continuous recognition task were employed to assess healthy participants' ability to handle interference from irrelevant emotional and neutral memories. Presumably, such interference can be due to salience from either emotional or mnemonic processing. In both experiments, participants made more false alarms to emotional faces that were familiar from preceding runs (i.e., emotion-induced temporal-context confusion). Participants performed well for neutral faces in the first experiment including only two runs. However, increasing the number of runs to four in the second experiment induced temporal context confusion also for neutral faces. The findings suggest that memory interference can be induced when the salience of irrelevant information is erroneously considered diagnostic for memory judgements.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• Memory
• Continuous recognition
• Emotion-induced recognition bias

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Susanna Bernstrup for assistance with subject recruitment and data collection (Experiment 2).