Department of Psychology, University of Munich, 80802 Munich, Germany.
Emotion. 2011 Aug;11(4):958-64. doi: 10.1037/a0024075.
Research has shown that positive affect increases the breadth of information processing at several higher stages of information processing, such as attentional selection or knowledge activation. In the present study, we examined whether these affective influences are already present at the level of transiently storing incoming information in sensory memory, before attentional selection takes place. After inducing neutral, happy, or sad affect, participants performed an iconic memory task which measures visual sensory memory. In all conditions, iconic memory performance rapidly decreased with increasing delay between stimulus presentation and test, indicating that affect did not influence the decay of iconic memory. However, positive affect increased the amount of incoming information stored in iconic memory. In particular, our results showed that this occurs due to an elimination of the spatial bias typically observed in iconic memory. Whereas performance did not differ at positions where observers in the neutral and negative conditions showed the highest performance, positive affect enhanced performance at all positions where observers in the neutral and negative conditions were relatively "blind." These findings demonstrate that affect influences the breadth of information processing already at earliest processing stages, suggesting that affect may produce an even more fundamental shift in information processing than previously believed.
研究表明，积极的情绪会增加信息处理的多个较高阶段的信息处理宽度，例如注意力选择或知识激活。在本研究中，我们研究了这些情感影响是否已经存在于注意力选择之前的瞬时存储传入信息的感觉记忆水平上。在诱导中性、快乐或悲伤的情绪后，参与者执行了一个衡量视觉感觉记忆的标志性记忆任务。在所有条件下，标志性记忆表现随着刺激呈现和测试之间的延迟增加而迅速下降，这表明情绪不会影响标志性记忆的衰减。然而，积极的情绪会增加标志性记忆中存储的传入信息量。特别是，我们的结果表明，这是由于消除了标志性记忆中通常观察到的空间偏差。尽管在中性和消极条件下表现最好的观察者的位置上，表现没有差异，但积极的情绪会提高在中性和消极条件下观察者相对“盲目”的所有位置上的表现。这些发现表明，情绪已经在最早的处理阶段影响信息处理的广度，这表明情绪可能会产生比之前认为的更基本的信息处理转变。
