Investigation of the role of emotional arousal in the attentional boost effect

Divided attention during encoding is known to have impairing effect on memory. The attentional boost effect (AB, Swallow and Jiang, 2010) it is an exception to this usual findings. According to this effect, in the divided attention task, the stimuli presented with the target are better remembered than the stimuli presented with the distractor. It is demonstrated that the memory enhancement associated with target detection is not caused by arousal (Swallow and Jiang, 2010; 2012). In these studies, however, arousal is not addressed in the emotional context. It is known that emotional arousal has contradictory effects on attention and memory. Mather and Sutherland (2011) explained why arousal sometimes enhanced attention and memory, and sometimes impaired them by arousal biased competition (ABC) theory. The aim of this study is to examine the role of emotional arousal on the AB effect in the context of ABC theory. It has been suggested that target and distracting stimuli can lead to competition in terms of levels of arousal that may impair the AB effect. Schematic faces (experiment 1), real faces (experiment 2) and affective pictures (experiment 3) were used as stimuli on the basis of the characteristics of having low and high arousal level in the experiments. The results showed that when the schematic faces were used, the AB effect was not impaired, but this effect was eliminated when real faces and affective pictures were used. In the first experiment using schematic faces, the AB effect emerged regardless of the level of arousal. In the second and third experiments, emotional arousal had no effect. The results indicate that emotional arousal does not have any effect on the AB effect. It is thought that the difference observed in the AB effect due to the use of schematic or real stimuli is due to the higher perceptual load of real stimuli.