Emotion and Memory: Ongoing And Recent Work


Immediate Memory For Dynamic Scenes

With Mike Greenstein (St. Peter's University), Mariana Martins (Columbia University), and Markus Maier (University of Munich).

In a threatening situation, it is highly beneficial to anticipate the actions of threatening agents (for example, in order to intercept or evade them). Using an adapted representational momentum paradigm, we show people several scenarios involving shapes moving on a computer screen. Participants read descriptions of these shapes as threatening (e.g., one person approaching another with a baseball bat in order to attack him) or as non-threatening (e.g., a player approaching his coach in order to return a borrowed bat). As soon as the depicted movement ends, people identify the final position of the moving object. Those who read about threatening situations misremember objects as having traveled farther along their trajectory than they do for neutral situations. This occurs despite identical (and impoverished) physical displays, and despite a delay of less than one second before test, and no direct threat to observers. Our work highlights the profound impact that emotional content can have on perception and memory for dynamic scenes.


Processing a Threatening Agent's Gaze

With Brittany Harman (Stony Brook University).

It is well established that memory is poor for the face of a stranger who was initially encountered under stress. While attending to details that impact surviving the situation is adaptive, attending to details that would later allow identification of the attacker are less important to immediate survival. This does not necessarily imply, however, that no aspect of the attacker's face should receive high processing priority. If any facial features of the attacker are particularly relevant to survival, attention to and memory for them should increase. One potentially promising candidate is the attacker's gaze. Knowing where a threatening person is looking allows prediction of the manner in which they may attack, what objects they may use as weapons, who they intend to victimize, and what direction may be most promising for escape. While several studies in the literature have suggested that face information is poorly processed in threatening situations, we are revisiting this question by testing memory for the direction of a perpetrator's gaze rather than memory for the perpetrator's identity.