Effect of emotional valence on the recognition memory of affective pictures under international and incidental encoding.

INTRODUCTION The mechanisms underlying visual memory for scenes and pictures by virtue of their affective contents offer an array of possibilities for further explorations. An enhanced memory for emotional contents owes to the salience by virtue of the information embedded through emotionality. Emotional enhancement effect in a wide range of laboratory studies have been demonstrated using a variety of experimental tasks in which the likelihood of remembering emotional than non-emotional or neutral information in visual scenes and picture have been demonstrated. Also, people often remember central, emotional information contained in visual scenes and pictures at the expense of background details. Such phenomenon is often termed as memory trade-off. Memory trade-off by virtue of its construct and implications has been one of the most entertaining grounds of research. The exact underlying processing of memory trade-off specific to emotional pictures implicates an enquiry into the mechanisms underlying. 1.1 Salience of Emotional Memory Emotional salience of a stimulus is mostly distinct in memory processing. A tremendous amount of research has suggested that emotion confers memory benefits (Kensinger, 2006; Mather, 2003). Though true photographic memory is not inherent to human memory the clarity of human memory in terms of retention remains a fact. However, the vividness and accuracy may not be maintained when it comes about detailed description or representation through retention. A distortion is rather apparent over time. Such effects have been in fact, evident in laboratory studies, particularly for,