Studies with adults found a memory bias for disgust, such that memory for disgusting stimuli was enhanced compared to neutral and frightening stimuli. We investigated whether this bias is more pronounced in females and whether it is already present in children. Moreover, we analyzed whether the visual exploration of disgust stimuli during encoding is associated with memory retrieval. In a first recognition experiment with intentional learning, 50 adults (mean age; M = 23 years) and 52 children (M = 11 years) were presented with disgusting, frightening, and neutral pictures. Both children and adults showed a better recognition performance for disgusting images compared to the other image categories. Males and females did not differ in their memory performance. In a second free recall experiment with eye-tracking, 50 adults (M = 22 years) viewed images from the categories disgust, fear, and neutral. Disgusting and neutral images were matched for color, complexity, brightness, and contrast. The participants, who were not instructed to remember the stimuli, showed a disgust memory bias as well as shorter fixation durations and longer scan paths for disgusting images compared to neutral images. This “hyperscanning pattern” correlated with the number of correctly recalled disgust images. In conclusion, we found a disgust-related memory bias in both children and adults regardless of sex and independently of the memorization method used (recognition/free recall; intentional/incidental).

对成年人的研究发现，人们对厌恶有记忆偏差，与中性和可怕的刺激相比，对恶心刺激的记忆增强。我们调查了这种偏见在女性中是否更为明显，以及在儿童中是否已经存在。此外，我们分析了编码过程中厌恶刺激的视觉探索是否与记忆检索相关。在第一个有意学习的识别实验中，向 50 名成人（平均年龄；M = 23 岁）和 52 名儿童（M = 11 岁）展示了恶心、可怕和中性的图片。与其他图像类别相比，儿童和成人对恶心图像的识别性能都更好。男性和女性的记忆表现没有差异。在第二个使用眼球追踪的自由回忆实验中，50 名成年人（M = 22 岁）观看了厌恶、恐惧和中性类别的图像。令人厌恶的和中性的图像在颜色、复杂性、亮度和对比度上进行了匹配。没有被要求记住刺激的参与者表现出厌恶记忆偏差，与中性图像相比，恶心图像的注视时间较短，扫描路径较长。这种“超级扫描模式”与正确回忆的厌恶图像的数量相关。总之，我们发现儿童和成人都存在与厌恶相关的记忆偏差，无论性别如何，也与使用的记忆方法无关（识别/自由回忆；有意/偶然）。