Coding Strategies And Processing Time On The Effects Of Emotional Memory Trade-off Effects On Age Characteristics

Emotional information is usually remembered better than neutral information, however, emotion does not boost memory for all aspects of an emotional event. Some aspects of an emotional event are better remembered, whereas other aspects may be more likely to be forgotten. Thus, people remember the details of the central emotional elements well but do not retain the details of the central peripheral non-emotional elements (often referred to as the emotion-induced memory trade-offs). The main factors of influencing the emotion-induced memory trade-offs are encoding strategy, encoding time, valence and age. The research investigated encoding strategy and encoding time how to affect children and young adults’ positive and negative memory trade-offs.Study 1 explored the children (younger children, intermediate children and older children) and young adults’ positive and negative memory trade-offs by incidental encoding strategy as time extended from two seconds to five seconds. Incidental encoding strategy is that participants were not informed that their memories would be assessed before the start of the learning phase. With 2s encoding time, older children and young adults showed the positive and negative memory trade-offs effects. Younger children and intermediate children did not show the effects. With 5s encoding time, older children and young adults still showed the positive and negative memory trade-offs effects. Younger children still did not show the effects. Intermediate children begin to show the negative memory trade-offs effects. Study 2 explored intentional encoding strategy that participants were specifically informed that their memories for components of the pictures would be assessed and that they should try to remember the pictures as best as they could. With 2s encoding time, older children showed the positive and negative memory trade-offs effects. Young adults and younger children did not show the effects. Intermediate children showed the negative memory trade-offs effects. With 5s encoding time, Young adults, younger children and older children all did not show the effects, intermediate children still showed the negative memory trade-offs effects.Based on the above studies’ results and analysis, in the present research, the main findings of this research were as below were the main conclusion drawn as follow:(1) Encoding strategy affects the trade-offs together with encoding time. From incidental encoding strategy to intentional encoding strategy, older children and young adults overcame the trade-offs but older children can’t overcame the trade-offs with 2s encoding time. From 2s encoding time to 5s encoding time, intermediate children’s trade-offs appeared with incidental encoding strategy and continued to show the effects with intentional encoding strategy. (2) The development of positive and negative memory trade-offs is influenced by age. Older children and young adults’ positive memory trade-offs have the same development with negative memory trade-offs. Intermediate children showed the negative memory trade-offs but the positive memory trade-offs did not appear. Younger children’s trade-offs does not exist. (3) Children’s trade-offs is developing along with the age. The development of older children’s trade-offs is close to young adults, intermediate children is developing and younger children’s trade-offs has yet to develop.