Memory Enhancing Effect of "Sad Places" in Older Adults: Evidence from Visuospatial Delayed Recall

Ma Yuting; Xu Hongzhou; Gui Wenjun; Hu Xinyue; Yu Jing

doi:10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20250209

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2025, Vol. 48 ›› Issue (2) : 359-370. DOI: 10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20250209

Developmental & Educational Psychology

Memory Enhancing Effect of "Sad Places" in Older Adults: Evidence from Visuospatial Delayed Recall

Ma Yuting¹, Xu Hongzhou¹, Gui Wenjun², Hu Xinyue¹, Yu Jing¹

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Abstract

Negative emotions can promote the formation and maintenance of memory, which is adaptive for human survival. This may help us recall important information that is directly or indirectly related to future survival. However, it is unclear how this emotional enhancement of memory changes with aging. Currently, research on negative emotions has focused more on immediate recall, while delayed memory tasks have not been extensively studied. The present study investigated the effects of aging on the negative emotional enhancement of memory effect in delayed recall and the neural mechanisms underlying it.
The experiments used a 2 (age: young adults vs. older adults) × 2 (valence: neutral vs. negative) mixed design, with age as the between-subjects variable and valence as the within-subjects variable. The present study used a paradigm of visuospatial associative memory under delayed recall, which required young adults (n = 39) and older adults (n = 35) to process neutral and negative stimuli and remember the location of the stimulus on a map. This experiment comprised two distinct phases: the learning phase and the test phase. In the learning phase, participants were asked to repeat the learning process until they correctly recalled the correct location of all emotional pictures on the background map. In the test phase, a delayed recall condition was added in addition to the immediate recall condition, with a 12-hour interval between the immediate associative memory test and the delayed associative memory test.
The results showed that these young and older adults showed the same pattern of immediate recall. There was no significant difference in the immediate recall performance of neutral and negative stimuli between young and older adults. However, after 12 hours, older adults showed better delayed recall performance for associative memory for negative stimuli than for neutral stimuli, whereas there was no difference between the negative and the neutral conditions for young adults. After a delay, negative stimuli showed negative emotional enhancement effects in older adults'associative memory. Neural representation similarity analysis during the memory retrieval phase showed that there were significant differences in the emotional neural representation of the superior occipital gyrus and the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex between young adults and old adults. And the neural representation of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex in older adults was significantly correlated with the accuracy of associative memory after a 12-hour delay. Moreover, the activation of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex in older adults can significantly predict their associative memory performance after a 12-hour delay.
Delayed recall of negative stimuli shows greater adaptability and has survival implications. From an evolutionary perspective, negative emotional stimuli imply that an event is directly or indirectly related to survival. Preserving memory for negative emotional stimuli after a delay is more adaptive, thus ensuring that we can recall this important information in the future. This may be a protective mechanism that helps older adults adapt to dangerous information in the outside world and avoid injury in daily life.

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emotional enhancement of memory effect / older adults / delayed recall / representational similarity / single-trial analysis

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Ma Yuting, Xu Hongzhou, Gui Wenjun, Hu Xinyue, Yu Jing. Memory Enhancing Effect of "Sad Places" in Older Adults: Evidence from Visuospatial Delayed Recall[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2025, 48(2): 359-370 https://doi.org/10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20250209

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