Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

The interplay between temporal memory coding and affect dynamics

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom
Also presenting in Data Blitz Session 3 - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm EDT, Constitution A.

Mengsi Li¹ (mengsili@ucsb.edu), Barry Giesbrecht, Regina C Lapate; ¹University of California, Santa Barbara

Everyday life is characterized by frequent shifts between emotional and neutral events. Emotional responses often ‘spillover’ beyond their context to bias appraisals of later-processed events (Lapate et al., 2017). Growing evidence suggests that emotional responses sculpt the temporal organization of memories (Wang & Lapate, 2024). However, the flip of the coin—whether temporal coding is associated with emotional-response dynamics—remains unclear. To address this, we designed a novel EEG event-boundary task. Participants (N=51) viewed emotional-event sequences of four positive or negative images, which were interleaved with novel-neutral face presentations. Following each sequence, participants rated neutral-face likeability (indexing affective spillover). Memory for temporal order and distance of emotional-image pairs sampled from within and across sequences was tested. We used factorial representational similarity analysis to unveil the structure of emotional valence and sequence processing, and the image-locked late-positive potential (LPP) to index emotional valence/arousal. Negative images were represented more similarly than positive ones. Images presented at closer sequence positions were also represented more similarly, an effect that increased with later sequence positions. Replicating event-boundary effects, emotional-image pairs sampled from across (vs. within) sequences were associated with longer temporal-distance judgements and poorer order memory. Critically, sequences producing shorter temporal distance judgments and better temporal-order memory elicited larger affective spillover, suggesting that emotional-event integration is associated with more pervasive emotional responses. Finally, larger LPPs predicted shorter temporal-distance estimates and larger affective spillover following negative sequences. Collectively, these findings underscore the bidirectional interplay between emotion and temporal memory—and suggest an affect-regulatory role for high-fidelity temporal coding.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions