Emotion and motion: superior memory for emotional but not for moving stimuli

TL;DR

This study found that emotional content improves memory, but motion alone does not help remember simple visual stimuli.

Contribution

The study is the first to test the dynamic superiority effect using simple visual stimuli and found no evidence for it.

Findings

Emotional enhancement of memory was consistently observed across experiments.

No dynamic superiority effect was found for simple moving stimuli.

Motion did not improve memory performance for isolated stimuli.

Abstract

Two effects on memory have been described in the literature: the emotional enhancement of memory (EEM) (i.e., an emotional stimulus is better remembered than a neutral stimulus) and the dynamic superiority effect (DSE) (i.e., a moving visual stimulus is better remembered than a static stimulus). However, the DSE has previously only been studied using complex visual stimuli (e.g., video clips). Thus, the first objective of the present study was to examine whether the DSE will be observed with simple visual stimuli (i.e., isolated moving stimuli). The second objective was to examine whether people’s emotional memory will be affected by stimulus motion. We conducted three experiments, two using a free recall task, Experiment 1A (online) and 1B (in-person), and one using a recognition task (in-person). Participants viewed negative, positive, and neutral stimuli in two motion conditions, dynamic and static, and then had to recall or recognize them. In all three experiments, we observed an EEM but no DSE. Thus, our data verify that emotions affect memory performance but provide no evidence of motion effects on memory of simple stimuli.

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