Cognitive and neural bases of episodic memory

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Many of the most memorable events in our lives are emotional. To better understand how emotion affects episodic memory, so far my Highly Qualified Personnel (HQPs) and I have used emotional words, sentences, and pictures. As a field, we have learned much already by using these types of stimuli. Yet, we can improve on them: For example, many of the images in the most popular still image collection are from the 1970s and look dated to current participants. Importantly, they may no longer be arousing enough to reliably elicit strong subjective and physiological responses. To overcome these challenges, my HQPs and I have assembled a set of almost 300 brief video clips to use as stimuli. The advantages of movie clips include moving images being more life-like and generally more emotionally evocative than still images. Although some previous movie clip sets exist, most are small and contain famous/familiar scenes from feature films, and many contain unrealistic scenes from science fiction/horror films. If scenes are familiar, this can influence participants' emotional responses, eye movements, attention, and memory. We have ensured that our stimuli are novel and realistic-looking, to avoid these problems. We will use these stimuli to ask what drives emotional memory, including whether young adults really show a negativity bias/advantage, and how different aspects of memory (e.g., recall vs recognition, central/core vs. peripheral/context) are affected by emotion, including examining the theoretically-relevant question of what happens after a delay. We will also examine individual and group differences in emotion's effects on memory, including cognitive and neurobiologically-relevant factors such as sex and hormonal effects, and adult age differences. A vast literature has developed on the question of whether older adults' emotional memory is qualitatively different from young adults', and using the methods in this program of research we will be able to answer this question in a more conclusive way. This program will serve as the basis for additional work on the cognitive neuroscience of emotion and memory, including neuroimaging. It fits well with my long-term goal of understanding the cognitive and neural bases of episodic and autobiographical memory.