The Effect Of Divided Attention On Emotional Associative Memory:Evidence From Behavioral And ERPs Study

Associative memory is referred as two or more items which are conjointly remembered,its processing is complex and requires considerable cognitive resources.A great number of studies indicated that divided attention in the encoding phase had different effect on neutral and negative associative memory,specifically,neutral associative memory was more inclined to be impaired when divided attention appearing in the encoding phase compared to negative memory.However,the encoding of associative memory included various stages,such as detail processing and meaning processing.Yet,there was no research directly investigated the effect of divided attention on neutral and negative associative memory in different encoding stages.In addition,many studies found that neutral information and negative information encoded in the fairly different ways,such as the speed,bias and strategy of processing.Therefore,the influence of different divided attention conditions on neutral and negative association memory should be further discussed.Besides,it was worth noting that the detrimental effect of divided attention on memory was mainly due to the destruction of deep,conscious coding processing.Therefore,the encoding instruction should also be taken into consideration.Finally,the present study used ERPs technique to further identify the cognitive mechanism of the effect of different divided attention conditions on the neutral and negative association memory.Based on the above researches,the present study aimed to discuss the following two questions through three experiments:(1)The influence of the different divided attention conditions on the neutral and negative association memory under incidental and intentional learning;(2)The “old/new” effect of neutral and negative associative memory in different divided attention conditions(familiarity/recollection).Experiment 1 adopted 2(emotion type: negative,neutral)× 2(divided attention condition: early divided attention,late divided attention)× 2(retrieval category: intact,recombined)within-subject experimental design,exploring the effect of different divided attention conditions on neutral and negative association memory under incidental encoding instruction.Experiment 2 changed the encoding method,and examined the effect of different divided attention conditions on neutral and negative association memory under intentional encoding conditions.Experiment 3 used ERP technology to further investigate the retrieval processes of neutral and negative association memory in different divided attention conditions.The behavioral indexes dependent variables of three experiments were the accuracy rate of the associative recognition test and correct response time.The ERP index of dependent variable of Experiment 3 was the "old/new" effect.The main results and conclusions of present study were as follows:(1)The results of Experiment 1 showed that under the incidental learning,the correct rate of negative items in association recognition was significantly higher thanneutral items,indicating emotional enhancement memory effect.However,there was no significant main effect of divided attention condition or the interactions between divided attention condition and other variables.(2)The results of Experiment 2 show that under the intentional learning,the correct rate of negative items in association recognition was significantly higher than neutral items,indicating emotional enhancement memory effect.In addition,the correct rate of neutral items in early divided attention condition was lower than which in late divided attention condition.While there was no significant difference in negative association memory between early divided attention and late divided attention.(3)The behavioral results of Experiment 3 were consistent with Experiment 2.The ERPs results indicated that the neutral associative memory in the early divided attention condition did not show the "old/new" effect at 300-500 ms and 500-700 ms,while in the late divided attention condition,the neutral associative memory showed an "old/new" effect at 500-700 ms which indicated the recollection processing.However,the negative association memory did not have the "old/new" effect at300-500 ms or 500-700 ms both in the early and late divided attention.In summary,the results of the above three experiments indicated that the effect of different divided attention conditions on neutral and negative association memory could only be observed under intentional learning rather than incidental learning;Moreover,neutral associative memory was more likely to be impaired in the encoding condition of early divided attention because of the detrimental effect on recollection,while the early and late divided attention have no difference effect on negative associative memory.