Bowen Holly J, Madan Christopher R
Department of Psychology, Southern Methodist University, PO Box 750442, Dallas, TX, 75275-0442, USA.
School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2025 Feb;32(1):396-406. doi: 10.3758/s13423-024-02546-9. Epub 2024 Jul 31.
Motivational and emotional influences on memory have been studied extensively; however, despite the link between these constructs, they have been studied in separate lines of research, with very little work examining their effects concurrently. The current study takes a novel approach to manipulate motivational and emotional influences orthogonally, and within the same task, to test their interplay on intentional memory formation. If emotion and reward motivation are tightly linked, they may rely on overlapping cognitive mechanisms, thus we would not expect emotion and reward to interact in memory. Alternatively, they could be distinct constructs and therefore would boost memory when both are included in the same experimental trial, above and beyond additive effects. To test these competing predictions, in Experiment 1, participants (n = 180) completed an old/new recognition memory task with emotional (negative, positive) and neutral words intentionally encoded with high or low reward anticipation cues. In Experiment 2, participants (n = 159) encoded emotional and neutral words with a high or low reward cue, but memory was tested with free recall using study-test blocks. The findings from both experiments converged. There were main effects of emotion and reward in generally hypothesized directions, but no evidence of an interaction between these factors. This is in line with the prediction that emotion and reward motivation are similar constructs. Their combination within a trial does not boost memory above and beyond either of these factors alone perhaps indicating these constructs have similar cognitive mechanisms.
动机和情绪对记忆的影响已得到广泛研究；然而，尽管这些概念之间存在联系，但它们是在不同的研究领域中进行研究的，很少有研究同时考察它们的影响。当前的研究采用了一种新颖的方法，在同一任务中正交操纵动机和情绪影响，以测试它们在有意记忆形成中的相互作用。如果情绪和奖励动机紧密相连，它们可能依赖于重叠的认知机制，因此我们预计情绪和奖励在记忆中不会相互作用。或者，它们可能是不同的概念，因此当两者都包含在同一实验试验中时，除了相加效应之外，还会增强记忆。为了检验这些相互竞争的预测，在实验1中，参与者（n = 180）完成了一项旧/新识别记忆任务，其中情感（消极、积极）和中性词通过高或低奖励预期线索进行有意编码。在实验2中，参与者（n = 159）用高或低奖励线索对情感和中性词进行编码，但使用学习-测试块通过自由回忆来测试记忆。两个实验的结果一致。情绪和奖励在一般假设的方向上有主效应，但没有证据表明这些因素之间存在相互作用。这与情绪和奖励动机是相似概念的预测一致。在一次试验中它们的组合并不会比单独的任何一个因素更能增强记忆，这可能表明这些概念具有相似的认知机制。
