Cargando…

Prospection and emotional memory: how expectation affects emotional memory formation following sleep and wake

Successful prospective memory is necessarily driven by an expectation that encoded information will be relevant in the future, leading to its preferential placement in memory storage. Like expectation, emotional salience is another type of cue that benefits human memory formation. Although separate...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Cunningham, Tony J., Chambers, Alexis M., Payne, Jessica D.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2014
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4120689/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25136328
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00862
_version_ 1782329131024777216
author Cunningham, Tony J.
Chambers, Alexis M.
Payne, Jessica D.
author_facet Cunningham, Tony J.
Chambers, Alexis M.
Payne, Jessica D.
author_sort Cunningham, Tony J.
collection PubMed
description Successful prospective memory is necessarily driven by an expectation that encoded information will be relevant in the future, leading to its preferential placement in memory storage. Like expectation, emotional salience is another type of cue that benefits human memory formation. Although separate lines of research suggest that both emotional information and information explicitly expected to be important in the future benefit memory consolidation, it is unknown how expectation affects the processing of emotional information and whether sleep, which is known to maximize memory consolidation, plays a critical role. The purpose of this study was to investigate how expectation would impact the consolidation of emotionally salient content, and whether this impact would differ across delays of sleep and wake. Participants encoded scenes containing an emotionally charged negative or neutral foreground object placed on a plausible neutral background. After encoding, half of the participants were informed they would later be tested on the scenes (expected condition), while the other half received no information about the test (unexpected condition). At recognition, following a 12-h delay of sleep or wakefulness, the scene components (objects and backgrounds) were presented separately and one at a time, and participants were asked to determine if each component was old or new. Results revealed a greater disparity for memory of negative objects over their paired neutral backgrounds for both the sleep and wake groups when the memory test was expected compared to when it was unexpected, while neutral memory remained unchanged. Analyzing each group separately, the wake group showed a threefold increase in the magnitude of this object/background trade-off for emotional scenes when the memory test was expected compared to when it was unexpected, while those who slept performed similarly across conditions. These results suggest that emotional salience and expectation cues interact to benefit emotional memory consolidation during a delay of wakefulness. The sleeping brain, however, may automatically tag emotionally salient information as important, such that explicit instruction of an upcoming memory test does not further improve memory performance.
format Online
Article
Text
id pubmed-4120689
institution National Center for Biotechnology Information
language English
publishDate 2014
publisher Frontiers Media S.A.
record_format MEDLINE/PubMed
spelling pubmed-41206892014-08-18 Prospection and emotional memory: how expectation affects emotional memory formation following sleep and wake Cunningham, Tony J. Chambers, Alexis M. Payne, Jessica D. Front Psychol Psychology Successful prospective memory is necessarily driven by an expectation that encoded information will be relevant in the future, leading to its preferential placement in memory storage. Like expectation, emotional salience is another type of cue that benefits human memory formation. Although separate lines of research suggest that both emotional information and information explicitly expected to be important in the future benefit memory consolidation, it is unknown how expectation affects the processing of emotional information and whether sleep, which is known to maximize memory consolidation, plays a critical role. The purpose of this study was to investigate how expectation would impact the consolidation of emotionally salient content, and whether this impact would differ across delays of sleep and wake. Participants encoded scenes containing an emotionally charged negative or neutral foreground object placed on a plausible neutral background. After encoding, half of the participants were informed they would later be tested on the scenes (expected condition), while the other half received no information about the test (unexpected condition). At recognition, following a 12-h delay of sleep or wakefulness, the scene components (objects and backgrounds) were presented separately and one at a time, and participants were asked to determine if each component was old or new. Results revealed a greater disparity for memory of negative objects over their paired neutral backgrounds for both the sleep and wake groups when the memory test was expected compared to when it was unexpected, while neutral memory remained unchanged. Analyzing each group separately, the wake group showed a threefold increase in the magnitude of this object/background trade-off for emotional scenes when the memory test was expected compared to when it was unexpected, while those who slept performed similarly across conditions. These results suggest that emotional salience and expectation cues interact to benefit emotional memory consolidation during a delay of wakefulness. The sleeping brain, however, may automatically tag emotionally salient information as important, such that explicit instruction of an upcoming memory test does not further improve memory performance. Frontiers Media S.A. 2014-08-04 /pmc/articles/PMC4120689/ /pubmed/25136328 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00862 Text en Copyright © 2014 Cunningham, Chambers and Payne. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Cunningham, Tony J.
Chambers, Alexis M.
Payne, Jessica D.
Prospection and emotional memory: how expectation affects emotional memory formation following sleep and wake
title Prospection and emotional memory: how expectation affects emotional memory formation following sleep and wake
title_full Prospection and emotional memory: how expectation affects emotional memory formation following sleep and wake
title_fullStr Prospection and emotional memory: how expectation affects emotional memory formation following sleep and wake
title_full_unstemmed Prospection and emotional memory: how expectation affects emotional memory formation following sleep and wake
title_short Prospection and emotional memory: how expectation affects emotional memory formation following sleep and wake
title_sort prospection and emotional memory: how expectation affects emotional memory formation following sleep and wake
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4120689/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25136328
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00862
work_keys_str_mv AT cunninghamtonyj prospectionandemotionalmemoryhowexpectationaffectsemotionalmemoryformationfollowingsleepandwake
AT chambersalexism prospectionandemotionalmemoryhowexpectationaffectsemotionalmemoryformationfollowingsleepandwake
AT paynejessicad prospectionandemotionalmemoryhowexpectationaffectsemotionalmemoryformationfollowingsleepandwake