Congruência e incongruência emocional na memorização de estímulos visuais em diferentes grupos de idade

Abstract

Theoretical Background: Episodic memory is a cognitive system that contextualizes information in time and space. It’s responsible for encoding, storage and recognizing the information, allowing us to remember it. Recognition – can beinfluenced by several factors such as age and emotion. It is known that recall tasks become more difficult to elderly subjects, comparing to recognition, where older participants have equal results to young participants. Through the presentation of images associated with music both with underlying emotional character and underdifferent conditions, I intend to understand the impact of emotional congruence on the ability to memorize images in two age groups. Method: A total of 30 subjects participated in this study, divided in two age groups: group 1 – 18 to 30 years – and group 2 – 50 to 65 years. Each subject was presented with several images (IAPS) associated to musical excerpts (both types ofstimuli with an emotional character of happiness and fear) in different congruence conditions (congruence, incongruence and unisensory). In the second task – recognition– musical sounds were excluded and 60 new images were added to the 60 of the previous task. Results: In recognition task we can say that there are no differences between the two groups, having both equal performance. Analyzing the congruent effect, significant differences are observed, with the incongruent being superior to the congruent conditionand the latter has less influence that de without-sound condition. Finally, the is no interaction between age and the emotional character of stimuli in recognition, with both groups remembering more positive than negative images. Discussion: The results obtained are in line with the expected hypothesis for the influence of age. However, they contradict the congruence hypothesis, being justified by the increased attention given to incongruent stimuli. And the unisensory condition issuperior to the bisensory condition due to the absence of music (which interferes withattention). There was no influence of age and emotion on recognition, since the positivebias is less frequent in recognition.

Date of Award	5 Feb 2021
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Filipa Ribeiro (Supervisor)