Abstract
Is it harder to forget an emotionally arousing visual stimulus than the kind of common household objects we use in vision science? Here we answered this question by having subjects remember emotionally arousing pictures in a recognition-induced forgetting task. Recognition-induced forgetting occurs when accessing one memory leads to the forgetting of related memories. Recognition-induced forgetting studies to date have demonstrated forgetting with everyday objects but here we asked whether negatively arousing images were also susceptible to forgetting. To this end, we conducted a typical recognition-induced forgetting experiment but included emotionally arousing images as well as emotionally neutral images. First, in the study phase, subjects studied images for a later memory test, including neutral everyday objects (e.g., dressers) and negatively arousing objects (e.g., rotten teeth). Then, in the practice phase, subjects were asked to recognize a subset of the studied images. Finally, in the test phase, memory for all images was tested. We found non-practiced negatively arousing images received an expected boost in memory strength. However negatively arousing images were still susceptible to recognition-induced forgetting. That is, recognizing an image of rotten teeth in the practice phase led to the forgetting of other studied rotten teeth. We replicated this result in a second experiment with images that were rated even more negatively arousing (e.g., dead bodies). These results suggest that it is just as easy to forget emotionally charged pictures as the simple objects more commonly used in vision science.