Enhanced recognition of disgusted expressions occurs in spite of attentional avoidance at encoding

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Tom Zalmenson¹  Omer Azriel¹  Yair Bar-Haim¹ 

[1] School of Psychological Sciences, Tel Aviv University

关键词: emotion;    facial expressions;    disgust;    Attention;    Memory;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1063073

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Negative emotional content is prioritized in memory. Prioritized attention to negative stimuli has been suggested to mediate this valence-memory association. However, research suggests only a limited role for attention in this observed memory advantage. We tested the role of attention in memory for disgusted facial expressions, a powerful social-emotional stimulus, in an incidental encoding task and a surprise memory test. Replicating prior studies, we found increased attentional dwell-time for neutral over disgusted expressions at encoding. However, contrary to the attention-memory link hypothesis, disgusted faces were better remembered than neutral faces. Although dwell-time was found to partially mediate the association between valence and memory, this effect was much weaker than the opposite direct effect. These findings point to independence of memory for disgusted faces from attention during encoding.

【 授权许可】

CC BY