POSITIVE DEVIANT STIMULI AND ITS EFFECTS ON MEMORY

Abstract

The emotional oddball paradigm (EOP) has long been used to investigate the effects that emotional deviants have on memory and the focal point of most EOP experiments is the effects on memory for neighboring items instead of memory for the deviants themselves. Although mostly consistent results have been found in the EOP studies, majority of the EOP studies have employed the use of negative emotional deviants as well as simple stimuli (e.g., single words) that may not be externally valid. The current study thus employed an adapted version of the EOP whereby a positive emotional deviant was presented, and paragraphs were used as stimuli to mimic real-life educational settings. Results from the study revealed that presentation of the positive emotional deviant enhanced memory for the paragraph following it (anterograde hypermnesia) but impaired memory for the paragraph preceding it (retrograde amnesia). Theoretical reasons as to why such findings were obtained were discussed and overall, the results provided evidence that positive emotional deviants can lead to emotion-induced effects on neighboring externally valid stimuli. This implies that the positive effects of presenting deviants (i.e., memory enhancement) may be generalized to real-life educational settings which helps provide direction for future EOP studies.