Last month, Sara Gallant presented her poster “Retroactive Selective Memory Enhancement via Emotional Arousal” at Psychonomics 2019. This study examined how selective memory for neutral information would be influenced by increases in emotional arousal occurring before or after learning. When participants viewed emotionally arousing faces after learning, their selective memory for neutral faces vs. neutral scenes was enhanced, providing evidence for a retroactive enhancement effect of arousal on selective memory. These findings are consistent with the notion of behavioral tagging, in which the consolidation of weakly encoded information can be selectively improved by a future emotional event that acts on a common neural population.
