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The Effects of a Distracting N-Back Task on Recognition Memory Are Reduced by Negative Emotional Intensity
Buratto, L.G. Pottage, C.L. Brown, C. Morrison, Catriona M. Schaefer, A.
Buratto, L.G.
Pottage, C.L.
Brown, C.
Morrison, Catriona M.
Schaefer, A.
Publication Date
2014-10-16
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(c) 2014 Buratto et al. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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2014-09-04
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Abstract
Memory performance is usually impaired when participants have to encode information while performing a concurrent task.
Recent studies using recall tasks have found that emotional items are more resistant to such cognitive depletion effects
than non-emotional items. However, when recognition tasks are used, the same effect is more elusive as recent recognition
studies have obtained contradictory results. In two experiments, we provide evidence that negative emotional content can
reliably reduce the effects of cognitive depletion on recognition memory only if stimuli with high levels of emotional
intensity are used. In particular, we found that recognition performance for realistic pictures was impaired by a secondary 3-
back working memory task during encoding if stimuli were emotionally neutral or had moderate levels of negative
emotionality. In contrast, when negative pictures with high levels of emotional intensity were used, the detrimental effects
of the secondary task were significantly attenuated.
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Citation
Buratto LG, Pottage CL, Brown C et al (2014) The Effects of a Distracting N-Back Task on
Recognition Memory Are Reduced by Negative Emotional Intensity. PLoS One. 9(10): e110211.
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