Abstract:

Although researches on the retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) of emotional memory are very rich, there remain inconsistent findings so far, meanwhile many studies on RIF always took emotional memory as a whole. Emotional stimuli we faced in real life are complex, consisting of many different characteristics, such as details or gist of event, central emotional information or peripheral non-emotional information, and people are not able to remember them all to the same degree. A plenty of researches on memory demonstrated a central–peripheral trade-off in memory for complex negative emotional event, namely enhancement of memory for emotional central details of a complex stimuli came at the expense of corresponding memory impairment for non-emotional peripheral details. Our research aims to find whether the central -peripheral trade-off in memory existed in the retrieval- induced forgetting of complex emotional pictures in 2 experiments. 72 complex emotion pictures are selected as experimental materials, which belong to 6 categories and are consisted of central items and peripheral backgrounds, furthermore the valence of central items is either negative or neutral and the valence of all peripheral backgrounds is neutral. In study phase, all participants were asked to study 72 complex pictures which were presented on screen one by one randomly. Then in retrieval phase, participants were instructed to practice either the retrieval of whole pictures (Exp1) or only the retrieval of backgrounds (Exp2). Finally, in test phase participants were asked to complete the old/new recognition test and indicate whether each test picture is old or new by pressing key. Results showed that: (1) emotional memory trade-off effects existed significantly in retrieval-induced forgetting regardless of practicing the retrieval of whole pictures or peripheral backgrounds; (2) negative items showed retrieval-induced forgetting the same as neutral items; (3) retrieval-induced forgetting existed only in the central items but not in the peripheral backgrounds, regardless of retrieving whole pictures or just retrieving backgrounds.

Key words: emotional memory, complex emotional stimuli, retrieval-induced forgetting, emotional memory trade-off effects