Department of Psychology, University of Toronto,Toronto, ON, Canada.
Emotion. 2011 Feb;11(1):12-9. doi: 10.1037/a0020288.
Ample evidence suggests that emotional arousal enhances declarative/episodic memory. By contrast, there is little evidence that emotional enhancement of memory (EEM) extends to procedural skill based memory. We examined remote EEM (1.5-month delay) for cognitive skill learning using the weather prediction (WP) probabilistic classification task. Participants viewed interleaved emotionally arousing or neutral pictures during WP acquisition. Arousal retarded initial WP acquisition. While participants in the neutral condition showed substantial forgetting of WP learning across the 1.5-month delay interval, the arousal condition showed no evidence of forgetting across the same time period. Thus, arousal during encoding determined the mnemonic fate of cognitive skill learning. Emotional enhancement of WP retention was independent of verbally stated knowledge of WP learning and EEM for the picture contexts in which learning took place. These results reveal a novel demonstration of EEM for cognitive skill learning, and suggest that emotional arousal may in parallel enhance the neural systems that support procedural learning and its declarative context.
大量证据表明，情绪唤醒增强了陈述性/情节记忆。相比之下，情绪增强记忆（EEM）是否扩展到基于程序性技能的记忆则证据较少。我们使用天气预报（WP）概率分类任务来检验认知技能学习的远程 EEM（1.5 个月延迟）。参与者在 WP 学习期间观看穿插的情绪唤起或中性图片。唤醒会延迟 WP 的初始学习。虽然在中性条件下的参与者在 1.5 个月的延迟间隔内对 WP 学习表现出明显的遗忘，但在唤醒条件下，在同一时间段内没有表现出遗忘的证据。因此，编码期间的唤醒决定了认知技能学习的记忆命运。WP 保留的情绪增强与 WP 学习的口头陈述知识以及学习发生的图片上下文的 EEM 无关。这些结果揭示了对认知技能学习的 EEM 的新示范，并表明情绪唤醒可能会并行增强支持程序性学习及其陈述性背景的神经系统。
