| 其他摘要 | Emotion signals play a crucial role in survival and social situations, profoundly affecting the way people remember information. Studies have shown that images of emotional scenes are better remembered than neutral ones, although the enhancement is not reflected in one’s memory of all components of the scene but has a certain selectivity. These studies reveal the specific mechanisms underlying the explicit memory for emotional scenes, while the current study extends the exploration of the emotional scene memory concerning its cognitive functions. We focused on whether emotional scene memory can automatically influence the visual consciousness of memorized images without intentional retrieval and further explored the cognitive mechanisms for this effect.
Taking advantage of the binocular rivalry and unconscious visual competition paradigms, Study 1 investigated the impact of emotional scene memory on visual processing at different consciousness levels, and further separated the role of gist representation and detail representation in this effect. Results revealed that, compared with unmemorized images, the memorized emotional (including positive and negative) scene images enjoyed a dominance advantage in the binocular rivalry task, while they showed a nonconscious processing disadvantage during the nonconscious visual competition (negative condition specifically). In addition, both effects of memorized images could be transferred at the gist level to their semantically similar but perceptually different counterparts, but not at the detail level. Moreover, the above phenomena could occur only for emotional scenes but not for neutral ones. Study 1 illustrated that emotional scene memory could specifically affect visual competition, showing different patterns at conscious and unconscious levels. More importantly, the gist representation rather than the detail representation of emotional scene memory plays a significant role in the above effect.
Study 2 focused on separating the different roles of the memories for central information (containing emotions) and background information of the emotional scenes in the observed visual competition advantage. We first repeated the previously discovered emotion-induced center-background memory trade-offs effect with an explicit memory task to verify the validity of the materials used in this study. We further found that memorized backgrounds of the emotional scene images could not trigger the advantage in binocular rivalry. However, when we presented the central element of the scene before the rivalry task, the background images matching the center cues gained a significant advantage in the rivalry task, with this effect occurring specifically for negative scene images. Moreover, we found that at the nonconscious level, the background images from the memorized emotional scenes could not affect subsequent visual processing, and the presentation of the negative center cues even impeded the nonconscious processing of the paired background images. Study2 demonstrated that the background memory of emotional scene images could not affect visual consciousness, while the center-background associative memory of negative emotional scenes can specifically affect visual consciousness, which provides indirect evidence that the observed influence of emotional scene memory on visual consciousness may be mainly driven by the memory for the central component of the scenes.
Taken together, our studies showed that emotional scene memory could automatically promote the visual processing of memorized images, leading to a perceptual advantage of these images over the unmemorized ones in binocular rivalry. This effect was specific to emotional memory and mainly driven by enhanced conscious processing of the memorized emotional scene. In addition, the memory of the gist and central contents (rather than detail or background contents) of the emotional scene images play a major role in the above effect. These findings reveal the functional significance of emotional scene memory in visual perception, providing a new perspective for exploring the specific cognitive neural mechanisms for emotional memory, and deepening our understanding of the interaction between emotion, memory, and visual consciousness. |
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