Fig 1.
(A) Participants were instructed to study two lists of neutral words embedded within negative pictures. After studying List1, participants were presented with a cue to either forget or remember the studied words. (B) On the day of encoding and on the following day, we measured participant’s memory strength for the words (direct memory modulation), and the pictures (indirect memory modulation). The pictures illustrated are from the DIsgust-RelaTed-Images (DIRTI), and the Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS) databases [35, 37].
Fig 2.
The dominance of negative visual context over neutral verbal memory.
(A) Under negative context, the instruction to remember List1 words (light red) did not enhance verbal memory, compared to the instruction to forget the words (light blue). List2 verbal memory strength was greater following the instruction to forget the words (light blue), relative to the instruction to remember the words (light red). (B) Negative visual memory showed resistance to indirect modulation, with comparable visual memory strength in List1 versus List2 when participants were instructed to remember or to forget the words. (C) There was no correlation between verbal and visual memory strength for List1. (D) Similarly, there was no correlation between verbal and visual memory strength for List2. Error bars represent ±1 Standard error of the mean (S.E.M.) *p<0.05.
Fig 3.
The dominance of negative visual context over neutral verbal memory persisted to the following day.
(A) Verbal memory strength remained similar for words under the remember and the forget conditions for the List1 and enhanced after the instruction to forget the words for List2. (B) Resistance of negative visual memory to indirect modulation also persisted to the next day. There was a general primacy effect for negative contextual pictures, with pictures from List1 remembered better than pictures from List2 under both types of instructions. Error bars represent ±1 Standard error of the mean (S.E.M.) *p<0.05.