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Category: Project

Description: One common strategy to test the positivity effect in emotional information processing is to examine memory for positive information. Participants with better recall or recognition of positive (compared to negative or neutral) information may have attended more closely to positive information during the task, leading to better encoding and retrieval. Memory probes are periodic trials in which participants are asked to recognize information from a previous trial and can be used to examine which specific information is attended to in a decision-making paradigm. Participants will complete a variant of the skewed gambling task to explore the role of memory for positive information in decision making. Interspersed among the 90 gambles will be 24 recognition probe trials. Participants will be asked in recognition memory probe trials if the amount (or probability) of a gain (or a loss) was part of the gamble on the previous trial. Probe trials will be distributed equally after positively- and negatively-skewed gambles and half of the probes will be correct and half will be incorrect. Thus, memory for each type of information (gain amount, loss amount, gain probability, or loss probability) will be probed 6 times.