ABSTRACT

Reward improves task performance while the emotional contexts irrelevant to the task impair task performance. An interaction between reward and the task-irrelevant emotional context has been discovered by some studies using perceptual tasks. However, it is unclear that how memory performance would be affected by both variables. This study aimed to answer this question and explore the role of arousal induced by emotional stimuli, to which was seldomly paid attention by previous studies. We conducted two experiments with the study-test paradigm. The first difference between the experiments was the way that the emotional stimuli were presented. They were presented with the words (Experiment 1) or separately (Experiment 2). The second difference was that the manipulation of the emotional arousal was phasic (Experiment 1) or tonic (Experiment 2). Both experiments showed that the reward effect was greater in emotional context compared to the neutral context, which is not only due to the poorer memory of no reward-associated words but also the better memory of reward-associated words in emotional contexts especially in negative one. These results supported the view that emotional arousal enhanced the memory of high priority stimuli (reward-associated words) and impaired the memory of low priority stimuli (no reward-associated words).

摘要

奖励可以提高任务绩效，而与任务无关的情绪环境会损害任务绩效。一些使用感知任务的研究发现了奖励和与任务无关的情绪环境之间的相互作用。然而，目前尚不清楚这两个变量如何影响内存性能。本研究旨在回答这个问题，并探讨情绪刺激诱发的觉醒的作用，而这在以往的研究中很少被关注。我们使用研究-测试范式进行了两个实验。实验之间的第一个区别是情绪刺激的呈现方式。他们用单词（实验 1）或单独（实验 2）呈现。第二个区别是情绪唤起的操纵是阶段性（实验 1）或强直性（实验 2）。两个实验都表明，与中性语境相比，情感语境中的奖赏效应更大，这不仅是因为没有奖赏相关词的记忆力较差，而且在情感语境中，尤其是在消极语境中，奖赏相关词的记忆力更好. 这些结果支持了以下观点：情绪唤醒增强了对高优先级刺激（奖励相关词）的记忆，并削弱了对低优先级刺激（无奖励相关词）的记忆。