Influence Of Affective Meaning On Memory For Color And Spatial Location Of Vocabulary

Since the foundation of scientific psychology, both emotion and memory have been important research topics in the research of psychology. The interaction between emotion and memory has become an object of research in psychology, which has formed a huge research system. In this system, each topic has been studied from multiple perspectives.From the eighties of last century, cognitive neuroscience psychology has been developed rapidly, and it is based on the research of brain and neural mechanism of the cognitive processes. The conclusion of cognitive neuroscience psychology provides the reference and demonstration for the cognitive models proposed. The combination between the brain and neural mechanisms and behavior researches must be an important trend in the future development of psychology. In this paper, we summarize the conclusions on the contextual information affected by emotional stimulus, most of which are rooted in the studies of foreign psychologists in recent years. Meanwhile, combined with conclusions of brain and neural mechanisms on the emotion and memory in the current cognitive neuroscience, it builds the assumptions of research, and verifies them by threes experimental designs. In this paper, Chinese words are used as the experimental materials, and the memory performance of the vocabulary of color and spatial location are measured. Its aim is to explore the impact of affective vocabulary on the contextual information.The first part briefly introduces the backgrounds of this paper. It mainly sums up the general knowledge about the impaction of affective meaning on the contextual information. Here we do not focus on all the contextual information, and it specifies the color and spatial location of affective vocabulary. At the same time it introduces the current cognitive neuroscience studies about the brain and neural mechanisms of color and spatial location in cognitive processes. All of these are the solid foundation to build the assumptions of the experiments.The second part is the main body of this article, constituted by the three experiments. In the first experiment, the experimental condition is to control the consciousness and unconsciousness in the memory of color vocabulary, analyzing of the impact of the affective meaning of vocabulary on the amount of the color of vocabulary. It finds that the memory of the vocabulary is affected significantly by the affective meaning of words learned, but there is no effect of consciousness levels on the memory of learned words. Comparably, the memory for color, in which words are typed, are better for emotional words than for neutral words, but only when color information is learned incidentally. The second experiment is based on the assumption that the time factor has a significant impaction on the memory for emotional words as well as the color. Its experimental results shows that the emotional valence of words have a great impact on the memory for words, but the time of words presented in the period of learning does not prompt the memory for words. In contrast, the memory for color is influenced by the emotional types of words and the time presented in the period of learning. Meanwhile, the interaction between the emotional types of words and the time of words learning is also up to the significance statistically. In the condition of short time words learning (50ms and 350ms), the memory for color is impacted by the emotional types of word learning, that is, the memory for color is enhanced in emotional words than non-emotional words. While, in the condition of longer word learning (1000ms), there is no effect of the type of words, and the amount of memory for color is not significantly difference between the emotional words and non-emotional words. In short, the results of experiment 1 and experiment 2 commonly demonstrate that the memory for color is a type of processing controlled by consciousness and the amount and the degree of cognitive resource by awareness. When the color of words are instructed in incidental learning or at very short time learning, the influence of the emotional type of words is distinct, more cognitive resource is focused on the memory for color of emotional words automatically. In contrast, in the condition of intentional memory for color of words or the enough cognitive resource controlled by consciousness, the impact of words'emotional type is not observable. The assignment and distribution of cognitive resource automatically in unconscious condition maybe is replaced or covered up by the aim-oriented manner of resource assignment.Experiment 3 explores the memory for color and spatial location simultaneously. Based on the assumption that spatial location and color processing depends on the different mechanisms, it tries to examine the separation between the memory for color and spatial location in this experiment. However, because of experimental design such as the confusion of variables, experimental results do not confirm the expected assumption. Though the results of experiment 3 are not ideal, it is a positive exploratory to the memory for spatial location and color at the same processing, and it provides a reference values for future research. In this connection, it is also meaningful.In the last part of this paper, some problems are summed up, meanwhile, the future research trends are constructively prospected.