The Effects Of Features Of Emotional Arousal Items On Associative Memory

Arousal-biased competition(ABC) theory tried to explain how arousal enhance or impair perception and memory. ABC theory proposes that emotional arousal amplifies biased competition processes, increasing the strength of high priority representations while suppressing other competing representations. Both top-down goal relevance and bottom-up perceptual salience determine the priority and initial activation levels of the representations. Studies had demonstrated that top-down priority and bottom-up priority play an important role in memory. In previously, there are no studies discuss the effects of goal relevance and perceptual salience which are as two aspects of the priority of information on associative memory. In addition, in daily life, we often see different things in the familiar scene, and also can see familiar in different scenarios. But there are few studies to research how the familiarity of items affects associative memory.There are lots of studies which had researched the effects of emotion on associative memory. Mather et.al argued that the emotional arousal of item is the root of enhancing memory. ABC theory is based on arousal and priority. Thus we were focus on the effects of emotional arousal and priority on associative memory in this study. Because the priority of information is determined by the goal relevance and perceptual salience, we researched the effects of top-down priority and bottom-up priority on associative memory, while investigating the relation between them. Experiment 1 adopted 2(emotional arousal: negative, neutral)×2(goal relevance: goal relevant, goal irrelevant)×2(perceptual salience: perceptual saliently, perceptual non saliently)within subject design. The result showed that top-down goal relevance plays a more impotent role in engraphia in the priorities of information. We investigated the familiarity of items on the basis of experiment 1. In the meantime, we manipulated the priority of information through control the goal relevance to further investigate the effects of characteristics of items on associative memory. Experiment 2 adopted 2(emotional arousal: negative, neutral)×2(goal relevance: goal relevant, goal irrelevant)×2(the familiarity of items: familiar, unfamiliar)within subject design.Results of the three experiments indicated that:1. Negative arousal enhanced the memory of items while impairing the memory of neutral backgrounds, and resulted in emotional memory trade-off effects.2. Emotional arousal enhanced amplifies biased competition processes of mental resources between high priority information and low priority information. So it made the high priority information remembered better and low priority information remembered worse.3. Emotional arousal enhanced the memory of perceptual salient stimulus while impairing perceptual non-salient stimulus. There was interaction between top-down goal relevance and bottom-up perceptual salience. But goal relevance was more influential to memory.4. Item preexposure made participants have familiarity on the items reduce the need of attention for items, and then put more attention resources on background. The familiarity of items weakened the associative memory between negative item and the background, while enhancing the associative memory between neutral item and the background.