Memory: familiarity, recollection, emotion and suspense

记忆：熟悉、回忆、情感、悬念

• 批准号: 183922-2009
• 负责人: Joordens, Steve
• 金额: $ 1.46万
• 依托单位: University of Toronto
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2009-01-01 至 2010-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=422985
• 关键词: Memory; familiarity; recollection; emotion; suspense

I am primarily interested in the processes underlying memorial influences on performance, especially as they relate to the distinction between conscious memory influences and unconscious memory influences. Some of the proposed research is a continuation of my work targeted at gaining a better basic understanding of these processes and how they interact in the context of memory for relatively "neutral" stimuli such as common words or objects. However, I've recently become interested in how these processes operate differently when the remembered stimuli are emotionally relevant. Recent experiments have suggested that the evidence supporting enhanced memory for emotional stimuli is tenuous at best and may reflect the distinctiveness of emotional stimuli more that actual effects of inducing emotions. These results are surprising given that the brain has structures in place that should enhance memory for emotionally significant events (i.e., the amygdala's activation of the hippocampal system). A core hypothesis explored in the proposed research is that the inconsistency of lab-based studies of emotional memory partly reflects the absence of a factor typically present in real-world emotional events; suspense. It is argued that suspense may activate the neural structures that would underlie enhanced memory for emotional events, and if suspense were brought into the laboratory studies, stronger and more consistent results would emerge. Surprisingly, there exist few if any studies examine the effect of suspense on memory, making the proposed work both novel and relevant.

我主要感兴趣的是记忆对表现影响的潜在过程，特别是当它们涉及到有意识记忆影响和无意识记忆影响之间的区别时。一些拟议的研究是我工作的继续，目的是更好地基本了解这些过程，以及它们如何在记忆的背景下对相对“中性”的刺激，如常见的单词或物体进行相互作用。然而，我最近开始感兴趣的是，当记忆中的刺激与情绪相关时，这些过程是如何不同地运作的。最近的实验表明，支持情绪刺激增强记忆的证据充其量是站不住脚的，可能更多地反映情绪刺激的特殊性，而不是诱导情绪的实际效果。这些结果令人惊讶，因为大脑的结构应该会增强对重大情绪事件(即杏仁核对海马体系统的激活)的记忆。在这项拟议的研究中探索的一个核心假设是，基于实验室的情感记忆研究的不一致在一定程度上反映了现实世界情感事件中通常存在的一个因素的缺失：悬念。有人认为，悬念可能会激活神经结构，而神经结构是增强对情绪事件记忆的基础，如果将悬念引入实验室研究，将会出现更强有力和更一致的结果。令人惊讶的是，几乎没有任何研究考察悬念对记忆的影响，这使得拟议的工作既新颖又相关。