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

We predict that the pattern of memory results for specific and general
recognition and the eye movement results will replicate the findings of
Experiment 7. That is to say emotional enhancement of specific and general
recognition for negative and positive stimuli, a central-peripheral trade-off in
memory for negative stimuli and attention narrowing onto the object in scenes
with a negative object. We predict that the positive emotional enhancement of
memory will to some extent be due to greater memory for the association
between the object and the background which will be revealed in the level of
memory for that association and also in some degree of implicit memory
reflected in a greater preference for backgrounds which have been previously
presented with positive objects.
Section 2.2. Method
Design
A within-participants mixed list design was used with scenes of a
neutral background and either a negative, neutral or positive object. The aim of
the experiment was to examine participants’ eye movements at the time of
encoding and investigate whether a range of measures of memory performance
could provide insights into factors other than attention which could explain the
emotional enhancement of memory. The design of the associative memory test
is similar to that used by Touryan et al (2007).
Participants
22 participant took part in this experiment, data from 4 were excluded
due to problems with the calibration of the eye tracker. Data from 18
participants (13 female) were included in this experiment. All were native
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