Center on Aging Psychology, CAS Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
China National Children's Center, Beijing, China.
Cognition. 2018 Oct;179:298-310. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.06.013. Epub 2018 Jul 2.
Two competing hypotheses attempt to explain the effects of emotional content on the production of false memory. The conceptual relatedness account posits that negative emotion increases false memory by strengthening familiarity process, whereas the distinctiveness heuristic account postulates that negative emotion reduces false memory by influencing recollection process. Here, using the categorized pictures paradigm, we examined these hypotheses by investigating emotional influences on false recognition memory performance and the event-related potential (ERP) correlates of familiarity and recollection. Participants were presented with positive, neutral, or negative pictures from various categories during encoding and later completed a recognition test while electroencephalogram data were recorded. Behavioral results revealed lower corrected false recognition rates for negative and neutral pictures than for positive ones, with no significant difference between negative and neutral pictures. In addition, negative pictures were associated with a more conservative response bias in comparison with neutral and positive pictures. Importantly, ERP results revealed enhanced recollection-related parietal old/new effects for negative pictures relative to positive and neutral pictures, but comparable familiarity-related early frontal old/new effects across each type of emotional valence category during both true and false recognition. Our results suggest that emotionally negative content may affect production of false memory mainly by engaging a distinctiveness heuristic. Methodological implications of these findings are discussed.
两种相互竞争的假说试图解释情绪内容对产生错误记忆的影响。概念相关性假说认为，负面情绪通过增强熟悉度过程增加错误记忆，而独特性启发假说则认为，负面情绪通过影响回忆过程减少错误记忆。在这里，我们使用分类图片范式，通过研究情感对错误再认记忆表现的影响以及熟悉度和回忆的事件相关电位（ERP）相关性，来检验这些假说。在编码过程中，参与者观看来自不同类别的积极、中性或消极图片，然后在记录脑电图数据的同时完成识别测试。行为结果显示，与积极图片相比，消极和中性图片的校正错误再认率较低，而消极和中性图片之间没有显著差异。此外，与中性和积极图片相比，消极图片的反应偏向更为保守。重要的是，ERP 结果显示，与积极和中性图片相比，消极图片的额顶区与回忆相关的旧/新效应增强，但在真实和错误识别过程中，每种情绪效价类别的早期额叶与熟悉度相关的旧/新效应相当。我们的结果表明，情绪负面内容可能主要通过启发式独特性来影响错误记忆的产生。这些发现的方法学意义将进行讨论。
