The long-term objectives for this project are to develop and test a new method for examining the kind of emotional influences on memory that are exhibited in """"""""flashbulb memories."""""""" Well-controlled laboratory experiments will test the hypothesis that emotional reactivity to visual scenes enhances episodic memory for the visual details in those scenes. This focused hypothesis helps to avoid some of the theoretical indeterminacy in previous discussions of such memories. Also, both emotional reactivity (to a standardized set of emotion-provoking scenes) and visual detail (e.g., particular left/right reflections of slides) are operationalized in concrete and physiologically motivated ways. In addition, the new method helps to overcome methodological concerns raised in previous naturalistic and laboratory research: Recognition memory procedures will provide experimental control and sensitive tests of memory accuracy, immediate tests will alleviate concerns about rehearsal of encoded information, and the use of many varied items will allow for strong and effective statistical tests. Preliminary experiments validate this method and indicate enhanced memory for details in high-emotional scenes but not in low-emotional scenes. Proposed experiments will examine important properties of this memory effect to address particular theoretical explanations. They will test whether detailed memory for emotion-provoking scenes (a) is observed only for negative scenes and not for the positive scenes, (b) depends on particular encoding or test tasks, (c) exhibits mood-congruent effects, (d) can be expressed in implicit memory, and (e) is influenced by retention interval. A clearer understanding of the properties of these flashbulb-like memory effects should help to suggest principles predicting the veridicality of emotional memories in eyewitness testimony situations. It also should help to provide new ways to conceptualize debilitating memories in post-traumatic stress disorder (and some phobias) and to suggest new treatments for such afflictions.
| Steele, Vaughn R; Bernat, Edward M; van den Broek, Paul et al. (2013) Separable processes before, during, and after the N400 elicited by previously inferred and new information: evidence from time-frequency decompositions. Brain Res 1492:92-107 |
