Sensory Overload: Do We Remember Better with Emotional Sounds or Sights?

Publication Date

2025

Presentation Length

15 minutes

College

College of Sciences & Mathematics

Department

Psychological Science, Department of

Student Level

Undergraduate

SPARK Category

Research

Faculty Advisor

Michael Oliver

WELL Core Type

Intellectual Wellness

SPARK Session

8 AM, Michael Oliver, Ayers 2080

Presentation Type

Talk/Oral

Summary

Working memory (WM) is a form of memory that allows a person to hold short-term information for immediate mental use. It is a necessary cognitive tool that ensures task execution and encoding. Research has found that not only do audial and visual stimuli impact our performance, but that such distractors affect our ability to recognize and recall human emotion. WM in and of itself is a well-covered field of research. However, where the WM field is limited in its exploration with emotional stimuli and our ability to recognize and recall emotional stimuli while under stress. To find the significance of this ability, we designed a test with four 2-back trials. In each trial, participants are asked to observe faces and/or words played that cued emotion and would have to continuously recall the emotional state of a face or word two units back. We hypothesize that there will be higher memory accuracy with visual n-backs with auditory distractors than auditory n-backs with visual distractors. If our hypothesis is supported by our findings, it could indicate how our cognition organizes stimuli in preference for attention and encoding. In that case, further research would be needed to consider not only the impact of environmental stressors on memory but the significance of each stimulus.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS