The Effect Of Emotion On Intra-item And Inter-item Associative Memory

The study on the effect of emotion on memory,mostly emotional impact on memory element separately,but in life,most of our memory to experience events in the form of episodic memory to save,in order to accurate memory event,we must to bind its various elements together,and keep in memory characterization of these bundles,this event will experience characterization of different elements together,form a set of features,is the formation of various sorts of elements of the connection memory.Mayes(2007),according to the different characteristics of memory,divides the connection memory into three categories: intra-item associative memory,within-domain inter-item associative memory,and between-domain inter-item associative memory.Previous studies on the effects of emotions on associative memory showed two contradictory results.One found that emotional arousal enhanced memory binding and the other found that emotional arousal weakened memory binding.Based on the results of this contradiction,Mara Mather proposed the theory of object bundling,which holds that emotional arousal strengthens the memory of intra-item associative memory,and damages the item-context associative memory.However,whether the object bundle theory can explain the influence of emotion awakening intra-item and inter-item associative memory is still controversial.In this study,the two different types of associative memory are used as independent variables to explore the effect of emotion on the intra-item and inter-item associative memory.Assuming that emotion affects the different effects of inter-item associative memory within the project due to the difficulty of memory of the two types of memory itself,this study will analyze the different effects of emotion by changing the quantitative relationship between intra-item and inter-item associative memory.The present research included four studies,which used classical associative recognition paradigm and cued recognition paradigm.In the first study,according tothe traditional method of studying the associative memory,we can control the time of learning coding by controlling the types and quantities of the emotion-induced items in the two different types of associative memory at the same time.Experiment 2,reduce the number of background images of inter-item associative memory,and keep them in accordance with the number of colors in intra-item,to examine the influence of emotio on the two different types of associative memory.Experiment 3,based on the experiments 1 and 2,control the number of categories to further explore the impact of emotion on the intra-item and inter-item associative memory.Experiment4,based on the experiment 3,decrease the difficulty of context picture to further explore the impact of emotion on the intra-item and inter-item associative memory.The experiment use a 2(emotion: negative or neutral)×2(type of associative memory : intra-item or inter-item)with one between-participant variable(type of associative memory),and one within-participant variables(emotion)We concluded that:First,the theory of object-based framework could not explain the effect of emotion on the intra-item and inter-item associative memory fairly well.When the the difficulty of binding is different the effects are also different.Second,emotion has a diminished the impairment effect on the inter-item associative memory when reducing difficulty of binding.Third,when the difficulty of binding increased,the promote effect of emotion on the intra-item associative memory is weakened.When difficulty of associative binding between intra-item and inter-item associative memory,the emotion impaired the memory of intra-item.Four,the amount of binding is not the only factor that affects the emotional effects of associative memory.