There will be a Pre-EuroCogSci talk this Thursday on 12 May (10:15am) by Winston D. Goh & Weiying Hu.
More details are appended below. This talk will be held in AS4/0208.
Title: Short-term Memory for Emotional Words: Separating the Effects of Emotionality and Semantic Relatedness
Facilitation effects of emotionally salient words in short-term memory have been found in a number of studies. However, there may be a confound of semantic relatedness with emotionality in these previous studies. The present study investigated the extent to which emotionality facilitates immediate memory when emotional and neutral words were presented in the context of homogeneous and heterogeneous semantic categories. Evidence of the emotional facilitation effect was only found in the heterogeneous conditions. Emotional salience did not facilitate memory above and beyond the facilitation provided by semantic categorisation. The results suggest that semantic relatedness may be a more salient aid to encoding and retrieval processes than emotionality.
Speaker’s Profile:
My research currently looks at various aspects of human memory and spoken language processing. Some of my studies explore the interplay between long-term memory and working or short-term memory. I specifically look at how the organisation of lexical knowledge in long-term memory, such as phonological neighbourhoods and semantic categories, can affect short-term memory processes. Another question is whether certain types of retrieval cues or memory codes, such as phonological or semantic codes, are more dominant than others, and how they may interfere with each other in the course of remembering. Related to the question of what type of codes and information get stored in memory, I examine how people make use of non-lexical information to recognise and remember words and sentences. I am specifically exploring the extent to which people remember the indexical properties of spoken language and how voice information may be used in word recognition and memory processes.
