People often express frustration when they forget where they put their keys or parked their car. The ability to remember spatial locations can be influence by motivation to remember and the importance of the objects in younger and older adults (Siegel & Castel, 2018). We examined how emotional information can be selectively remembered and bound to spatial locations. Participants studied positive and negative emotional objects in a spatial layout, and then recalled the location of each object. Participants then rated the subjective importance of each object, to determine if these ratings were related to memory. Participants were more likely to remember the general vicinity of emotional objects relative to neutral objects. In addition, recall performance was positively correlated with subjective importance ratings. The results suggest that emotional binding can influence memory for high-priority objects, providing evidence that value or importance can enhance memory for spatial locations.
Alan Castel, Ph.D.
UCLA Department of Psychology
1285 Franz Hall Box 951563
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563
Tel. (310) 206-9262
http://castel.psych.ucla.edu<http://castel.psych.ucla.edu/>
New Book Better with Age: The Psychology of Successful Aging<https://www.amazon.com/Better-Age-Psychology-Successful-Aging/dp/0190279982/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1523471886&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=alan+castel+bett>
TEDx Talk How We Learn as We Age<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5jUjOr7G8M>