The Effect Of Emotional Conflict Control On Memory Encoding And Retrieval:an ERP Study

Background and ObjectiveEvidence is mounting that emotional conflict is mainly resolved by the "emotional contror" system of the rostral anterior cingulate inhibiting the processing of emotional distracters.However,this theory has not been verified from the perspective of memory retrieval.This experiment aimed to explore the offline effect of emotional conflict on memory retrieval.MethodsWe adopted a modified encoding-retrieval paradigm to study this issue.Participants'EEG signals were also collected.During the encoding phase,a face-word Stroop task was used to create the congruency factor.During the retrieval phase,an old/new judgment task was used to evaluate the recognition performance.ResultsDuring the encoding phase,there was a significant conflict effect for behavioral data.In addition,in terms of ERP,N450 components related to conflict processing were discovered.The discovery of conflict effect shows that conflict factors have been successfully manipulated during the encoding phase.We also found the EPN and LPP components related to emotional processing,and there was no difference between the congruent condition and the incongruent condition in these two ERP components.Unfortunately,we did not find subsequent memory effect in this phase.During the retrieval phase,the response time of the incongruent condition was longer and the recognition accuracy was lower compared with congruent and neutral conditions in the behavioral data.For electrophysiological responses,we detected two well-established ERP old/new effects related to memory retrieval under both neutral and emotional conditions:the frontal negativity(FN400)related to familiarity-driven recognition and the late posterior negativity(LPN)related to reconstructive processing or evaluation of retrieval outcomes.More importantly,during the early stage of FN400(300-400 ms),the old/new effects were missing for incongruent condition,but not for congruent and neutral conditions.Besides,for LPN,the old/new effects of the incongruent condition are greater than the congruent condition.ConclusionsThe results prove that the encoding phase's emotional congruency factor has a regulatory effect on the retrieval phase's early familiarity processing and evaluation of retrieval outcomes.Our experiment confirmed the inhibitory effect of emotional conflict control on memory retrieval.