The Effect Emotional Arousal On Item-background Associative Memory With Different Semantic And Spatial Relationship:Evidence From Behavior And Eye-movement

The effect of emotion on associative memory is currently under debate,Mather(2007)proposed that the reason of this disagreement was that the types of associative memory studied by researchers were different.He proposed that emotion could enhance intra-item associative memory,while impair the inter-item associative memory.Because emotional objects can attract too much attention,such that it is difficult to bind the object and its background contextual information.Whether attention is the only explanation to inter-item associative memory is still not clear.The levels of unitization framework assumes that emotion can promote associative memory between two separate items under conditions in which the pair of items will be encoded as a single unit.It was generally believed that people remembered better for the information that has direct association semantically(semantically central)and spatially(spatially central)with emotional events,but it was still unclear which played a more important in inter-item associative memory between semantic relationship and spatial relationship.Therefore,this research aimed at exploring how semantic and spatial relationship would influence the associative memory between emotional items and neutral backgrounds.Furthermore,we wanted to know whether attention could predict the inter-item associative memory effectively.To solve these issues,we designed three experiments.Experiment 1 adopted a(arousal of items: negative or neutral)×2(semantic relevance : relevant or irrelevant)× 2(the distance between item and background: near or far)within-subject design.Experiment 2 adopted a(arousal ofitems: negative or neutral)×2(semantic relevance : relevant or irrelevant)×2(where the item located in the background: central or peripheral)within-subject design.Experiment 3 adopted a(arousal of items: negative or neutral)×2(semantic relevance :relevant or irrelevant)× 2(spatial consistency: consistent or inconsistent)within-subject design.The dependent factors of three experiments are the accuracy of item memory,the accuracy of item-background associative memory,and the rate of fixation number on area of interests and the distribution ratio of attention to area of interest.We concluded that:(1)Semantically relevant and Spatial Relationship would constraint the influence of emotion on the item-background associative memory,and semantically “central” has more constraint than spatially central.(2)The levels of unitization would constraint the influence of emotion on the item-background associative memory.(3)Attention is not the only explanation to effect of emotion arousal on inter-item associative memory.