Arousal-biased competition in perception and memory

By Mara Mather, Matthew R. Sutherland. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2011

894 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Our everyday surroundings besiege us with information. The battle is for a share of our limited attention and memory, with the brain selecting the winners and discarding the losers. Previous research shows that both bottom–up and top–down factors bias competition in favor of high priority stimuli. We propose that arousal during an event increases this bias both in perception and in long-term memory of the event. Arousal-biased competition theory provides specific predictions about when arousal will enhance memory for events and when it will impair it, which accounts for some puzzling contradictions in the emotional memory literature.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f24c17885f8f8520338214c5b4ad5506195c06b

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Negative arousal amplifies the effects of saliency in short-term memory. Emotion, 12, 1367-1372. (2017, methodology): “These findings indicate that negative emotional arousal increases the selectivity of attention, and provides evidence for arousal-biased competition theory (Mather & Sutherland, 2011), which predicts that emotional arousal enhances representations of stimuli that have priority.”
Academic Emotional Learning: A Critical Component of Self-Regulated Learning in the Emotional Learning Cycle (2019, background): “Specifically, Mather suggested the presence of an arousal-bias competition so that stimuli or aspects that are more arousing would be better remembered because they draw attention (Mather & Sutherland, 2011).”
Corpses, Maggots, Poodles and Rats: Emotional Selection Operating in Three Phases of Cultural Transmission of Urban Legends (2014, neutral): “Arousal may play a part too (Mather and Sutherland, 2011).”
Enhanced Emotional Memory (2013, neutral): “Arousal-biased competition theory (Mather & Sutherland, 2011) neatly accounts for the effects of postencoding arousal induction by suggesting that only high-priority memory traces benefit from the modulation mechanism, and that both a list containing only neutral items and emotional stimuli in a…”
Emotional arousal does not enhance association-memory (2012, background): “…been replicated with many different paradigms and materials, including arousing words and pictures, as well as more realistic events like flashbulb memories (e.g., Berntsen & Rubin, 2004; Bradley, Greenwald, Petry, & Lang, 1992; Brown & Kulik, 1977; Christianson, 1992; Mather & Sutherland, 2011).”