Daniel Reisberg

Remembering Emotional Events

Recent experiments have implied that emotional arousal causes a narrowing of attention and, therefore, impoverished memory encoding. In contrast, other studies have found that emotional arousal enhances memory for all aspects of an event. We report two experiments investigating whether these differing results are due to the different retention intervalsemployed.inpaststudies or to their different categorization schemes for the to-be-remembered- materiaL-Our results indicate a small role for retention interval in moderating emotion’s effects on memory. However, emotion had markedly different impacts on different types of material: Emotion improved memory for gist and basic-level visual information and for plot-irrelevant details associated, both temporally and spatially, with the event’s center. In contrast, emotion undermined memory for details not associated with the event’s center. The mechanisms for emotion’s effects are discussed.

Vivid memories of emotional events: The accuracy of remembered minutiae

It has been claimed that emotional arousal causes a narrowing of attention, and, therefore, impoverished memory encoding. On this view, if details of an emotional event are reported subsequently, these details must be after-the-fact reconstructions that are open to error. Our study challenges these claims. Using a long-term (2-week), incidental learning procedure, wefound that emotion promotes memory both for information central to an event and for peripheral detail. This contrasts with the results of explicit instructions to remember or to attend closely to the event, both of which seem to promote memory for the event’s gist at the expense of detail. The likely mechanisms underlying these effects are discussed.

Memory for thematically arousing events.

Many studies have indicated that emotional arousalimproves memory for thecenter, or gist, of an event butundermines memory for the event’speriphery. However, all of these studies have elicited emotion by showing participants some salient visual stimulus intended to arouse them (e.g., the sight of a wound). This stimulus may have served as anattention magnet, and this, not the arousal, may have been the cause of the observed narrowing of memory. In this article, we examine how participants remember events that involvethematically induced arousal, arousal produced by empathy, rather than by a visual emotional stimulus. The data show that emotionality improves memory for all aspects of these events, with no memory narrowing.

The quantity, not the quality, of affect predicts memory vividness

Vivid or detailed memories are reliably associated with the recollection of emotional events. However, the mechanism through which emotionality has this impact remains unspecified. Our results indicate that the character of the emotion does not influence memory vividness; instead, vividness seems to be dependent only on the quantity of emotion that accompanies the event. We consider the implications of this for accounts of emotion’s effects.

The role of subvocalization in auditory imagery

Five experiments explored the utility of subvocal rehearsal, and of an inner-ear/inner-voice partnership, in tasks of auditory imagery. In three tasks (reinterpreting ambiguous auditory images, parsing meaningful letter strings, scanning familiar melodies) subjects relied on a partnership between the inner ear and inner voice, one similar to the phonological loop system described in the short-term memory literature. Apparently subjects subvocally rehearsed the imagery material, which placed the material in a phonological store that allowed the imagery judgement. In a fourth task (distinguishing voiced and unvoiced consonants in imagery), subjects still subvocally rehearsed, but seemed to need no additional phonological store to respond correctly. In this case they may have consulted articulatory or kinesthetic cues instead. In a fifth experiment (making homophone judgements), subjects hardly even needed to subvocally rehearse, a result suggesting that homophone judgements rely on some direct route from print to phonology. We consider the breadth of the partnership between the inner ear and inner voice, the level that subvocal rehearsal occupies in the cognitive system, and the functional neuroanatomy of the phonological loop system.

Diverting Subjects' Concentration Slows Figural Reversals

Earlier research has shown that subjects are slower to discover the alternative construal of ambiguous geometric figures if they are simultaneously engaged in distractor tasks. Results are reported which show that this effect slows reversals subsequent to the first reversal, and is therefore not merely slowing the discovery of the alternative construal. In addition, the magnitude of the distraction effect seems unchanged through the successive reversals. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for figural reversal and of their implications for the role of mental resources in perceiving.

Overcoming Stroop Interference: The Effects Of Practice On Distractor Potency

With practice, do distracting stimuli lose their ability to distract? In a series of experiments, subjects practiced counting digits, a task subject to Stroop-type interference, and then were tested in a variety of transfer conditions. The results indicate that digits do lose their ability to distract as a result of practice but that this loss is highly specific; practice in ignoring one pair of distractors (2 and 4) does not improve later performance when ignoring a different pair (1 and 3). However, this practice effect does transfer to distractor stimuli having the same meaning as the stimuli ignored in practice (TWO and FOUR, but not TO and FOR). The results can be explained either in terms of active learning to suppress distraction or in terms of habituation of competing responses.

“Enacted” auditory images are ambiguous; “pure” auditory images are not

Previous research indicates that visual images are inherently unambiguous. The present study extends this argument to auditory imagery. In Experiment 1, subjects were able to reinterpret an imaged ambiguous auditory figure, but covert subvocalization apparently aided this reinterpretation. When subvocalization was blocked, reinterpretations were eliminated. Experiments 2 and 3 generalize this finding to different procedures and stimuli. Experiment 4 explores further the role of subvocalization, by showing that the likelihood of reinterpreting an imaged stimulus is directly proportional to the degree of enactment allowed. We argue that subvocalization or enactment provides an internal stimulus that is subject to reinterpretation. Without enactment, the “pure” auditory image is as unambiguous as a visual image. Thus, in both visual and auditory modalities, images come into being as representations and so are inherently meaningful.

Response-Time Measures as a Means of Exploring Tonal Hierarchies

We explore the possibility of studying music perception with responsetime measures. Subjects heard either a chord (tonic triad) or scale prime, followed by a single note, and indicated whether the note did or did not belong in the primed key. Overall, the data resemble the tonal hierarchy previously demonstrated with other methods, thus establishing the validity of the response-time measure. In addition, the scale primes superimpose a recency effect on the standard hierarchy, as would be expected from a serially presented stimulus. We discuss what this implies about tonal hierarchies, and the use of response-time measures to study the online processes of music listening. We also report data for nondiatonic tones.

Looking where you listen: visual cues and auditory attention

Abstract In the non-laboratory environment, we are generally able to see the source of the sounds to which we are attending. In a preliminary examination of how and to what degree we might use this visual information, subjects shadowed one of two female voices when able to see the persons speaking (Experiment I) or when able to see, and thus precisely localize, the auditory loudspeakers (Experiment II). Selective performance was improved by being able to see the lip movements of the people whose voices were heard, and by being able to localize visually the sources of the voices.