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 theories, emotional items were more likely than neutral items to trigger recall of the associated background. This finding suggests that there is a memory trace of this contextual information and that emotional cues may facilitate retrieval of this information.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• cued recall
• memory
• retrieval
• scenes
• narrowed-encoding

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Anthony Cossette, Rebecca McGregor, Jennifer Rawding, Z'Corrian Jeter, Jennifer Sellers, Rachel Finney, and Grace Longanecker for assistance with study design and data collection. We thank Chris Madan for comments on a previous draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2015.1059317.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by NIMH [grant number MH080833] (to E.A.K.).