Age Effects in Emotional Memory and Associated Eye Movements

Overview

Journal Brain Sci

Publisher MDPI

Date 2022 Dec 23

PMID 36552178

Authors

Daphne Stam

Laura Colman

Kristof Vansteelandt

Mathieu Vandenbulcke

Jan Van den Stock

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Mnemonic enhanced memory has been observed for negative events. Here, we investigate its association with spatiotemporal attention, consolidation, and age. An ingenious method to study visual attention for emotional stimuli is eye tracking. Twenty young adults and twenty-one older adults encoded stimuli depicting neutral faces, angry faces, and houses while eye movements were recorded. The encoding phase was followed by an immediate and delayed (48 h) recognition assessment. Linear mixed model analyses of recognition performance with group, emotion, and their interaction as fixed effects revealed increased performance for angry compared to neutral faces in the young adults group only. Furthermore, young adults showed enhanced memory for angry faces compared to older adults. This effect was associated with a shorter fixation duration for angry faces compared to neutral faces in the older adults group. Furthermore, the results revealed that total fixation duration was a strong predictor for face memory performance.

Citing Articles

Investigating Eye Movements to Examine Attachment-Related Differences in Facial Emotion Perception and Face Memory.

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PMID: 39021704 PMC: 11252031. DOI: 10.3389/fnagi.2024.1375435.

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