PDF (PhD Thesis Susan Chipchase) - Nottingham eTheses ...

these backgrounds should be less complex to process and this finding is at odds
with the other patterns of results found throughout this series of experiments.
The results from the eye movement recordings are consistent with the
central-peripheral trade-off in memory that was found for scenes with a
negative, but not positive or neutral, object. Taken together these results
suggest attentional effects at the time of encoding may contribute to the
enhancement of visual specificity of memory by negative emotion. The lack of
any attentional effects with scenes with a positive object suggest that attention
effects at encoding are not responsible for the enhancement of visual
specificity of memory by positive emotion and that an alternative explanation
is required.
The attention narrowing we found for negative stimuli was consistent
with previous research examining eye movements which found attention
narrowing for negative, in comparison to neutral, stimuli (Christianson et al.,
1991). Christianson et al. (1991) found that although attention narrowing was
related to a negative emotional enhancement of memory it was not necessary
for the memory effect to occur because the emotional enhancement remained
even when attention was controlled across neutral and emotional slides, for
instance by allowing participants only one fixation on the critical slide. Our
findings suggest that the negative enhancement in this experiment is due to the
additional fixations on negative objects allowing greater encoding of negative
details and ultimately enhancing negative visual memory specificity.
The difference in eye movements between scenes with a positive or
negative object, and the similarity in eye movements between scenes with a
positive and with a neutral object, provided no evidence that the enhancement
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