Memory: familiarity, recollection, emotion and suspense

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

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.