Inhibitory Effects On Autobiographical Memories Cue Retrievals After Subliminal Primes

Considerable research has examined the priming of semantic information, but thepriming of autobiographical memories has received much less research attention. Inrecent decades，the studies on autobiographical memory organization and retrievalhave found the positive priming of autobiographical memories using supraliminalprimes paradigm. The self-memory system (SMS) proposed by Conway andPleydell-Pearce (2000) assumed that autobiographical information is stored in anetwork of highly organized interconnected nodes that is also subject to the spreadingactivation, much like the networks described in the spreading activation models ofsemantic priming. So, will subliminal priming affect autobiographical memoriesretrievals?The current research has two experiments. Experiment1examined retrievalcharacteristics of autobiographical memories after subliminal priming by usingtwo-character noun words with different emotional valences as prime words, andneutral words without direct affect association as cue-words. Experiment2alsoexamined retrieval characteristics of autobiographical memories after subliminalpriming, but used priming words and cue-words were different from Experiment1.The priming words were two kinds of concrete lifetime periods and the cue-wordswere the words represented different lifetime periods and neutral words which did notdirect toward concrete lifetime periods.Results found that participants in Experiment1provided less-positive ratings forthe emotional content of autobiographical memories retrieved after the subliminalpresentation of positive affect-associated primes than to memories retrieved after thepresentation of negative affect-associated primes and in Experiment2more recentmemories were retrieved when cue-words that did not relate to a special lifetimeperiod were preceded by the early childhood primes than preceded by the latechildhood/early adulthood primes, suggesting that subliminal primes produced aninhibitory effect on autobiographical memory retrieval.This research used subliminal primes and confirmed that autobiographicalmemory is an organized hierarchical structure which can be organized by emotion andlifetime periods, finally forms a spreading activation network model. The result of this research may support the self-memory system (SMS) of autobiographical memory.