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Unexpected Arousal Suppresses Memory And Metamemory Predictions During Associative Face-Name Recognition Task, Sameer Sabharwal-Siddiqi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Successful recognition often depends on probabilistic estimation of memory-signal. Arousal has been shown to offset the influence of heuristic evidence on memory prediction. We conducted three experiments that tested whether arousal also suppresses predictions relevant to memory confidence. Experiments employed associative face-name memory tasks that included retrospective (Experiments 1 and 2) or concurrent (Experiment 3) judgements of confidence. During test, subjects were presented with a masked-affective face on a subset of trials. By timing the masked-affective face to precede a recognition judgement (Experiment 1), we replicated the finding that unexpected arousal offsets the influence of heuristic evidence on expectations of …