Curtayne, Eileen

Laney, Campbell, Heuer, and Reisberg (2004) proposed that the preferential recall of
central relative to peripheral information in a negative event (known as "memory
narrowing") is the product of presenting participants with a visually arousing attention
magnet -- not negative emotion, as the Easterbrook ( 1959) hypothesis suggests. Laney et
al. used conceptually meaningful (or thematically arousing) events to stimulate an
emotional response in participants instead of visual arousal and found evidence that
negative arousal improves memory for all categories of details. The current study tested
Laney et al. 's theory that a visually arousing stimulus, rather than negative arousal, is
responsible for memory nan·owing as well as their position that negative arousal benefits
recall of both central and peripheral information. Support was found for both assertions
of Laney et al. The presence of a visually salient and emotionally provoking detail
produced an effect similar to the traditional memory narrowing pattem and exposure to
the negative thematic climax resulted in improved memory performance for all the detail
categories. However, this latter effect was observed only for the female participants. No
evidence was found to support the Easterbrook hypothesis.

Everyday individuals experience problems in accurately remembering who did what in an event. In order to have an accurate memory for an event of this type, an individual needs to remember the person who performed the action, the action itself, and the pairing of these two pieces of information. If these pieces of information are not bound together correctly, the end result is an inaccurate memory for an event. This study examined the ability of young and older adults to bind people and their actions together in memory. Though both age groups were more likely to falsely recognize novel combinations of familiar actors and actions than they were to falsely recognize novel actions, the older participants were even more likely to falsely recognize these novel combinations. The misbinding of actors and actions may thus contribute to the problem of mistaken eyewitness identification.