Start Of The Mood Of The Picture Material And Emotional Memory: An Erp Study

The relationship between emotion and cognition is an important subject in the field of emotion and cognitive neuroscience. Affective priming is one of classical paradigms in research on emotion while priming by emotional picture has attracted more and more researchers' attention.In recent years, characteristics and mechanisms of emotional memory has been focused on again. But there is few researches on effect of affective priming on emotional memory at present. This research explored the interaction between affective priming and emotional memory on the basis of the previous work, and explored mechanisms of human emotional processing under the condition approaching real life.This research binded classical affective priming and learning-recognition paradigms when used facial expressions as priming stimuli and ordinary emotional pictures as target stimuli. Volunteers are college students. In encoding phase, participants were asked to make decision on the valence of target pictures; in retrieval phase, they were asked to judge whether the pictures were presented in previous study phase. Behavioral data and ERPs were recorded during two phases and then offline analyzed.Our behavioral results didn't show the classical affective priming effect, but the retrieval accuracy by consistent priming was significantly greater than inconsistent priming. ERPs results indicated that ERPs induced by positive targets were significantly more positive than negative targets in widely. Consistent priming induced waves significantly more positive than inconsistent priming in central parietal and the middle of parietal occipital, during 200-350ms of encoding phase and 300-500ms of retrieval phase. During time course of priming effect, there was also interaction between priming and target effect. We speculate this interaction is induced by difference of processing and inhibition of emotional conflict on different target valence.According this research, some conclusions are drawn as follows:(1) Affective priming by emotional pictures in encoding phase significantly influences emotional memory. Consistent priming improves cognitive processing and memory encoding to increase the accuracy rate of recognition when inconsistent priming decreases it. (2) There is negativity bias in processing of emotional pictures.In early emotional automatic processing, attentional bias to negative stimulus occupies more cognitive resource than positive and blocks cognitive tasks. However, in later processing with consciousness, there is cognitive bias to positive stimulus. Furthermore, the valence of target pictures restricts affective priming effect. (3) There is old/new effect in retrieval of emotional pictures.