Abstracts 2005 - The Psychonomic Society

Papers 69–76 Friday Afternoon
SYMPOSIUM: The Effect of Emotion on Declarative Memory
Grand Ballroom Centre, Friday Afternoon, 1:30–3:25
Chaired by Morris Moscovitch, University of Toronto
1:30–1:45 (69)
The Effect of Emotion on Declarative Memory. MORRIS MOSCO-
VITCH, ADAM K. ANDERSON, & DEBORAH TALMI, University
of Toronto—In this symposium, speakers attempt to integrate the exciting
work on the cognitive mechanisms and the neural substrate underlying
the effect of emotion on declarative memory. Going beyond
the fundamental claim that memory for emotional events is better than
memory for neutral events, speakers discuss the phenomenological,
cognitive, and neurobiological uniqueness of emotional memories.
Cahill discusses the effect of sex differences and hemisphere laterality
on the modulatory effects of emotion on memory consolidation.
Kensinger discusses the effects of emotional content on the likelihood
that individuals will remember particular details associated with an
event. LaBar discusses how emotional intensity and valence alter the
perceptual and cognitive properties of autobiographical memories.
Anderson discusses the role that self-referential and meaning-based
encoding processes have in the enhanced retention of emotional memories.
Speakers draw on and integrate data from behavioral, neuroimaging,
and animal research.
1:45–2:10 (70)
Sex and Hemisphere Influences on Emotional Memory. LARRY
CAHILL, University of California, Irvine—Extensive evidence from
animal and human subject work supports the view that endogenous
stress hormones and the amygdala interact to modulate memory storage
processes for emotionally arousing events. In recent years, increasing
evidence has documented influences of both subject sex and
cerebral hemisphere on brain mechanisms of emotional memory.
These influences will be the focus of this presentation.
2:10–2:35 (71)
The Effects of Emotion on Memory Specificity. ELIZABETH
KENSINGER, Boston College and Martinos Center for Biomedical
Imaging—Emotion infuses many of life’s experiences. Numerous
studies have demonstrated that the likelihood of remembering a particular
experience can be affected by its emotional content, with emotional
experiences more often remembered than neutral ones. In this
talk, I will present recent evidence indicating that the emotional content
of information also can increase the likelihood that individuals remember
particular details associated with an event (e.g., whether an
item was imagined or remembered; the specific visual details of a presented
item). I also will discuss neuroimaging evidence suggesting
that the engagement of limbic regions (particularly the amygdala and
orbitofrontal cortex) during encoding and retrieval mediates these effects
of emotional content on memory specificity.
2:35–3:00 (72)
The Phenomenological Experience of Emotional Remembering.
KEVIN LABAR, Duke University—Psychologists tend to define the
memory-enhancing effect of emotion as the likelihood that an emotional
event will be retrieved, relative to a neutral one. However, emotion
influences not just the accessibility of memory traces but also
subjective aspects of remembering. Behavioral data will be presented
that considers how emotional intensity and valence alter the cognitive
properties of autobiographical memories. Neuroimaging studies will
be reviewed that identify components of the autobiographical memory
network that are sensitive to variations in emotional intensity and
the sense of reliving during recall. Finally, the role of the medial temporal
lobe in the successful retrieval of remote emotional memories
will be discussed, with an emphasis on dissociating structures that
mediate recollection versus familiarity. This research characterizes
the broad influence of emotional intensity on memory and reveals
synergistic actions of the amygdala, hippocampus, and inferior pre-
12
frontal cortex that underlie the phenomenological experience of emotional
remembering.
3:00–3:25 (73)
Psychological and Neural Accounts of Emotional Enhancement of
Episodic Memory. ADAM K. ANDERSON, University of Toronto—
Emotional events are often highly personally relevant and may be associated
with self-referential and meaning-based deep processing, resulting
in their enhanced retention and phenomenological salience.
Neurobiological approaches, however, suggest that such emotional
enhancement critically depends upon enhanced memory consolidation
mediated by the amygdala—an evolutionarily older neural structure
not associated with higher order psychological processes. Neural
accounts suggest that the greater psychological salience of emotional
memories may simply reduce to the prerequisite of greater amygdala
recruitment. Data will be presented in only partial support of this notion,
showing that amygdala recruitment is necessary but insufficient
to account for enhanced remembrance of emotional events.
Task Switching
Grand Ballroom East, Friday Afternoon, 1:30–3:50
Chaired by Erik M. Altmann, Michigan State University
1:30–1:45 (74)
Switch Cost Confusion: Validity Problems in Task-Switching Research.
ERIK M. ALTMANN, Michigan State University—A central
construct in the study of cognitive control is switch cost, the effect on
performance of switching, as opposed to repeating a task between trials.
However, a little-discussed fact is that the most common paradigms
for measuring switch cost, explicit cuing and alternating runs,
measure it differently. Whereas explicit cuing compares trials after a
switch cue with trials after a repeat cue, alternating runs compares the
first trial of a run (also a switch trial) with the second trial of a run
(also a repeat trial), which is a significant confounding, because both
the position and the switching variables independently affect performance.
Widespread discussion of these two switch cost measures as
identical has likely contributed to the heterogeneity of the data on
switch cost, and the confounded nature of the alternating-runs version
suggests that even dramatic findings from that paradigm add little diagnostic
value to theoretical debates over models of cognitive control.
1:50–2:05 (75)
Decomposing Interference and Adaptation Costs in Task Switching.
DANIEL GOPHER, VERED YEHENE, & OLGA CHUNTONAV,
Technion–Israel Institute of Techology—Experiments were conducted
to evaluate the relative contribution, to the costs of task switching, of
adaptation and reconfiguration efforts, as compared with interference
and inhibition factors. Theoretical accounts for performance costs in
task switching vary in their emphasis on the influence of the two types
of costs. We combined task switching with the task flankers paradigm,
in an attempt to distinguish between these determinants of switching
costs. Flankers on the sides of the imperative stimulus at each trial are
distractors that need to be actively blocked. Results show that in task
switching, flankers in one task become effective distractors in another
task only when tasks are practiced in alternation, but not in uniform
blocks. In task-switching blocks, their effects are comparable to
flankers of the same task, both in repetition and in switching trials.
The results are discussed in the framework of executive control models
and the costs of task switching.
2:10–2:25 (76)
Across-Trial Stimulus Similarity Affects Response Speed, But Not
the Task-Switching Cost. ANDRÉ VANDIERENDONCK, BAPTIST
LIEFOOGHE, & FREDERICK VERBRUGGEN, Ghent University—
The possible influence of stimulus-to-task associations on the cost of
switching between two tasks was investigated in a cued task-switching
design. This was studied by means of across-trial distance priming of