Arousal-Biased Competition in Perception and Memory
- 24 March 2011
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Perspectives on Psychological Science
- Vol. 6 (2), 114-133
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691611400234
Abstract
Our everyday surroundings besiege us with information. The battle is for a share of our limited attention and memory, with the brain selecting the winners and discarding the losers. Previous research shows that both bottom–up and top–down factors bias competition in favor of high priority stimuli. We propose that arousal during an event increases this bias both in perception and in long-term memory of the event. Arousal-biased competition theory provides specific predictions about when arousal will enhance memory for events and when it will impair it, which accounts for some puzzling contradictions in the emotional memory literature.Keywords
This publication has 146 references indexed in Scilit:
- fMRI studies of successful emotional memory encoding: A quantitative meta-analysisNeuropsychologia, 2010
- Of bits and wows: A Bayesian theory of surprise with applications to attentionNeural Networks, 2010
- Bayesian surprise attracts human attentionVision Research, 2009
- Top-down and bottom-up mechanisms in biasing competition in the human brainVision Research, 2009
- The basolateral amygdala modulates specific sensory memory representations in the cerebral cortexNeurobiology of Learning and Memory, 2009
- Reconciling findings of emotion-induced memory enhancement and impairment of preceding items.Emotion, 2009
- Noradrenergic activation of the basolateral amygdala modulates consolidation of object recognition memoryNeurobiology of Learning and Memory, 2008
- The interference of operant task performance by emotional distracters: An antagonistic relationship between the amygdala and frontoparietal corticesNeuroImage, 2008
- The affective regulation of cognitive priming.Emotion, 2008
- Attention in hierarchical models of object recognitionProgress in Brain Research, 2007