The Effects Of Emotion On Iconic Memory: An Event-related Brain Potentials Study

Nowadays, the relationship between emotion and cognition becomes a hot topic. The emotion itself is very completive, we also have not known its mechanism clearly, and memory is one of the completive issues in cognition field. Since the 19 century Ebbinghaus initiated the research of memory, it got a lot of notice from psychologists.Today, as the improvement of the research method, we got plentiful and substantial fruits in this field. But most of those are about the long-term memory. Recently, also appearance some article about the effects of emotion on working memory or on implicit memory. As one of the third memory system, sensory memory has little research on itself. Maybe there are some reasons, the first reason maybe the time it exists is too short to research, the second reason maybe it belongs to the prime moment of cognition, researchers have no interesting in it.Because of emotion has effect on both long-term memory and working memory, we think about that whether it has effect on sensory memory?The study includes tow parts, the behavioral experiment and the ERP experiment. The behavioral experiment has three factors, emotion, priming and interval, use mixture design, priming type as a factor between S, emotion and interval as factors within S. The ERP experiment use adopts tow factors priming type and emotion value by within S design, and the interval as 500ms. The procedures of two experiments keep consistent, first use different priming type to present pictures of face which includes different expression to arouse emotion, then present the letter pictures which required S try their best to remember, and then give the high tone or low tone at random to give cue for S which line of the letter picture must be remember, so after this, given a detective picture of letters, required Ss to estimate whether it is the same as which asked to remember before. After one section of E, Ss may assess their emotion state by a five point scale.Our study suggests that (a) the effect on iconic memory of subliminal affective priming is less than affective priming of above consciousness ;(b) both of negative and positive emotion have effect on iconic memory, and the positive emotion is more than negative.