A study by scientists in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology found that emotion does help to strengthen memory for contextual details, thereby disagreeing with current speculation that posited that the emotional state can weaken ability to remember contextual details.
Supervising the authors in this report is Paul Bogdan, currently a postdoc at Duke University, and professors Florin and Sanda Dolcos from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“The interactions between emotion and memory are still unreported,” reacted Florin Dolcos. In this, we showed when contextual details could be stopped from being forgotten, thus upsetting the status quo at both theoretical and practical levels regarding what can be done about control, channel and capitalize on the energy of the emotions for better remembering.
In condition that participants were emotionally aroused and did remember, the fMRI data provided support for interference between functions of and emotion network with and that of recollection network to enhance contextual information recollection. That is incongruous with the current assumption that emotion interferes with memory for such details by suppressing recollection-processing brain areas.
We could compare the above studies to those employing Beckman’s eye-tracking amenities and one of the 3 Tesla MRI machines. A webcam-based eye tracking study was required since participants engage in this work from a distance.
In the majority of these new papers on emotional memory, added more data to this process, according to Bogdan. Webcam-based eye-tracking is an advanced technology, and this is the first study of emotional memory that does not only confirm the feasibility of the approach.
PTSD has been found a mark of memory decontextualization, or a diminished ability to integrate a traumatic event with its context in a manner that makes ready activation by potentially unrelated stimuli. The authors would like to think that this research could contribute to approaches to avoid decontextualization and facilitate recontextualization.
Implanted information can also be general in application for the improvement of memory. This is particularly important given the fact that older people commonly show impairments in memory for the context as a function of ageing.
It must be mentioned that even generalization’s of strategies that directly engage attentional resources with the spirit of an image or situation helps to slow down the decline of memory as well.
“It is common knowledge that emotion degrades memory for contextual details. These are suggestions as to why our relational memory is always negative when we are in the middle of something stressful. So if this is the case, then the outlook is rather bleak, said Sanda Dolcos.
“If we use a recollection-oriented approach when we encode, store and retrieve anything that we need to remember— this is the basic recipe to memory success” added Florin Dolcos.
Reference:
Otolski L. Emotion enhances memory for contextual details, research demonstrates Medical Xpress‌
