The ERP Research Of The Effect Of Emotional Arousal And Incidental Encoding On The Inter-item Associative Memory

Most of the events we have experienced in real life are preserved in the form of episodic memory.Associative memory was another focus of attention in the context of episodic memory.The Dual-process Model argued that recognition was supported by two processes that were mechanically and functionally separated: familiarity and recall.Researchers generally believed that the recognition of single item could be simultaneously supported by familiarity and recall,but in the associative recognition task,the retrieval of new context only could be supported by the recall processing(Hockley et al.,1999;Yonelinas,1997).The unitization hypothesis proposed by Yonelinas(2002)provided the possibility that the recognition of associative memory could be supported by the process of familiarity.The ERPs studys of the associative recognition paradigm were mostly found the FN400 effect in related items retrieval,which was pointed out to support the unitization hypothesis.But less of the previous study focused on the impact of arousal item in the associative recognition.It was worth studying whether the emotion arousal would bring differences for the different information.In addition,previous studies had focused on the intentional encoding of the associative relationship of two items,and few studies had focused on the incidental encoding of the high degree of integration of materials.Based on the previous study,this study used the triple key judgment paradigm of associative recognition,which included two experiments to discuss the influence of emotional arousal and incidental encoding on the recognition of inter-item associative memory.Experiment 1 adopted a 2(semantic relatedness: related,unrelated)× 3(retrieval category: intact,recombined,new)within-subject design,studied on the inter-item associative memory of the neutral-negative pairs under the intentional coding condition.Experiment 2 examined the effect of emotional arousal on the inter-item associative recognition in incidental encoding on the basis of experiment 1and previous studies.Experiment 2 adopted a 2(emotion type: neutral,arousal)× 2(semantic relatedness: related,unrelated)× 3(retrieval category: intact,recombined,new)mixed experimental design.The coding material of arousal group was same as Experiment 1,both of which were neutral-negative pairs;the coding material of neutral group were similar to those of previous studies.Subjects in the two groups were tested the number of the stimulus materials and did not intentional encoding the pairs.The dependent variable was the accuracy of the associative recognition between the items,the correct response time,the type of the error response,and the "old/new" effects of the two ERP index involved in the association memory study,which reflect the familiarity and the recall.This study draws the following conclusions:(1)Emotional arousal have an negative impact on the associative memory of unrelated material,especially in the case of incidental encoding;(2)The semantic relevance of neutral material can promote the formation of integrated representation of different items and improve the associative memory performance;(3)The results of ERPs show that familiarity and recall affect the recognition of associative memory of neutral semantic related materials simultaneously;(4)The semantic relevance of the material in learning phase has a significant impact on the inter-item associative memory.