Modulation of associative memory by emotional item encoding

Abstract

Treball fi de màster de: Master in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media

Supervisor: Daniel Pacheco

Associative memory, which is the ability to link items with contextual details, is essential for navigating the world and guiding future behavior. Emotional salience, especially of negative valence, is known to influence memory, but its precise effect on associative versus item memory remains debated. While some studies report impairments in context recall for emotional items, others suggest emotion can enhance associative binding under specific conditions. In this study, we investigated how emotional item encoding modulates the ability to recall contextual details during a recognition memory task. Participants encoded images of varying emotional valence (positive, negative, neutral), each paired with a contextual background. At retrieval, they were asked to identify whether an image was old or new, and to recall its original context. Our results show that emotional items were recognised with high accuracy, consistent with prior work, but importantly, we found differential effects on context memory depending on emotional valence. Contrary to the expected “emotional trade-off” effect, context memory for emotional items, particularly negative, was not impaired, and in some cases, enhanced. A follow-up analysis comparing performance of one participant across two me points revealed a statistically significant improvement in associative memory, suggesting that repeated exposure to emotional-context pairings may strengthen context binding. These findings provide behavioral evidence that emotional content can modulate associative memory in complex, and not always disruptive, ways.