Schedule of Events | Symposia

The impact of affect prediction errors on episodic memory

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Rohini Kumar¹ (rohini.kumar@emory.edu), Anny Huang¹, Mason McClay², David Clewett², Alexandra O. Cohen¹; ¹Emory University, ²University of California, Los Angeles

Enhanced memory for salient events can be driven by emotion and by prediction errors, or mismatches between expectations and outcomes of unfolding events (Rouhani et al., 2023). Recent work has suggested that affect prediction errors – deviations in expected feelings – can influence social decision making (Heffner et al., 2021), but the role of affect prediction errors in memory formation remains unclear. This study aimed to determine how prediction errors elicited by dynamic fluctuations in affective states impact episodic memory. Participants encoded sequences of images while listening to clips of emotionally evocative music. Following encoding, participants listened to each clip again while continuously rating their subjective valence and arousal using the novel ‘Emotion Compass’ tool. Twenty-four hours later, they completed item recognition and temporal source memory tests for the encoded images. Valence and arousal prediction errors were defined as the difference between actual affect ratings and expected ratings (a weighted average of recent ratings), and calculated trial-wise for each participant. Using linear mixed effects models, we found that unsigned valence prediction errors, or the magnitude of deviation from expected valence, enhanced temporal source memory. By contrast, there were no significant effects of affect prediction errors on item recognition memory. These effects were observed in a reanalysis of a published dataset (McClay et al., 2023) and replicated in an independent dataset. Together, these findings suggest that larger discrepancies between expected and actual valence, regardless of direction, selectively enhance the ability to bind items to their temporal contexts in memory.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions