Memory: familiarity, recollection, emotion and suspense

我主要对记忆影响表现的过程感兴趣，特别是当它们与有意识记忆影响和无意识记忆影响之间的区别有关时。一些拟议的研究是我的工作的延续，旨在更好地理解这些过程，以及它们如何在相对“中性”的刺激（如常见的单词或物体）的记忆背景下相互作用。然而，我最近开始感兴趣的是，当记忆的刺激与情感相关时，这些过程是如何不同的。最近的实验表明，支持情绪刺激增强记忆的证据充其量是脆弱的，可能更多地反映了情绪刺激的独特性，而不是诱发情绪的实际效果。这些结果令人惊讶，因为大脑中有相应的结构可以增强对情感上重要事件的记忆（例如，杏仁核激活海马系统）。该研究提出的一个核心假设是，基于实验室的情绪记忆研究的不一致性部分反映了现实世界情绪事件中典型因素的缺失；悬念。有人认为，悬疑可能会激活神经结构，从而增强对情感事件的记忆，如果将悬疑引入实验室研究，就会出现更有力、更一致的结果。令人惊讶的是，很少有研究考察悬念对记忆的影响，这使得这项工作既新颖又相关。

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.