White Corey N, Kapucu Aycan, Bruno Davide, Rotello Caren M, Ratcliff Roger
a Department of Psychology , Syracuse University , Syracuse , NY , USA.
Cogn Emot. 2014;28(5):867-80. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2013.858028. Epub 2013 Dec 4.
Recognition memory studies often find that emotional items are more likely than neutral items to be labelled as studied. Previous work suggests this bias is driven by increased memory strength/familiarity for emotional items. We explored strength and bias interpretations of this effect with the conjecture that emotional stimuli might seem more familiar because they share features with studied items from the same category. Categorical effects were manipulated in a recognition task by presenting lists with a small, medium or large proportion of emotional words. The liberal memory bias for emotional words was only observed when a medium or large proportion of categorised words were presented in the lists. Similar, though weaker, effects were observed with categorised words that were not emotional (animal names). These results suggest that liberal memory bias for emotional items may be largely driven by effects of category membership.
认知记忆研究经常发现，相较于中性项目，情感项目更有可能被标记为已学过。先前的研究表明，这种偏差是由情感项目增强的记忆强度/熟悉度所驱动。我们通过推测情感刺激可能看起来更熟悉，因为它们与同一类别的已学项目具有共同特征，来探究这种效应的强度和偏差解释。在一项认知任务中，通过呈现包含小比例、中等比例或大比例情感词汇的列表来操纵类别效应。只有当列表中呈现中等或大比例的已分类词汇时，才会观察到对情感词汇的宽松记忆偏差。对于非情感的已分类词汇（动物名称），也观察到了类似但较弱的效应。这些结果表明，对情感项目的宽松记忆偏差可能很大程度上是由类别成员效应驱动的。
