Emotional arousal enhances the impact of long-term memory in attention

ABSTRACT

Research reveals that long-term memory guides attention. However, it remains unclear how it interacts with emotional arousal to guide attention. To address this issue, we asked participants to learn the locations of a target key embedded within scenes (i.e. a training phase). On the next day, participants’ arousal was manipulated by presenting with a previously fear-conditioned tone (CS+) or a neutral tone that had not been paired with electrical stimulation (CS−), followed by the brief presentation of a scene from the training phase. Participants indicated whether the scene included the target key. The target was presented at the same location as in the training phase. Results revealed that CS+, compared with CS−, led to faster target detection, suggesting that arousal induced by CS+ enhanced the effects of long-term memory in guiding attention. These findings support our hypothesis: Arousal amplifies the effects of priority in visual search due to long-term memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Arousal biased competition
• memory-guided attention
• spatial memory
• visual search

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data, stimuli, and the experimental files that support the findings of this study are openly available in OSF at http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/2B4M7.

Notes

1 Due to programming errors, we had an unequal number of trials across conditions for all participants: 13 trials with CS+ for the target memory condition but 14 trials with CS+ for the no-target condition (see Table 1).

2 One participant did not have any correct responses in the CS+/no-target memory condition during the test phase. Data from this participant were still included in our analyses but performance for the condition was treated as missing data in the analysis on the reaction times.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants from the European Commission (PCIG13-GA-2013-618600) and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JP16H05959; JH16H06406). The first author was personally funded by the Republic of Turkey Ministry of National Education in accordance with the law no. 1416.