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Temporal Flow of Emotional Experiences Influences How Neutral Cues Reconstruct Memory

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 5:00 – 7:00 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Chantelle Cocquyt¹ (), Isabel Wilson¹, Khushi Sharma¹, Daniela Palombo^1,2; ¹University of British Columbia, ²Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health

Emotional experiences unfold within a temporal stream, surrounded by neutral moments that occur before and after. The current study examined how the temporal dynamics of emotion shape what neutral content “carries” about an emotional experience, facilitated through the strength of the associative binding to the central emotional event. Drawing on two theoretical perspectives, one emphasizing predictive binding of preceding neutral content to ensuing emotional experiences, and another emphasizing emotional context effects that linger to shape memory for subsequent content, we tested whether emotion interacts with cue position to influence episodic remembering. To test these ideas, participants encoded image triplets consisting of a neutral before-object, a negative or neutral middle-scene, and a neutral after-object. At retrieval, they were cued with either the before- or after-object and answered questions about the associated middle-scene. Across two independent samples, cueing with after-objects enhanced subjective memory specificity, precision, and emotional integrity—but not temporal-order memory—for negative relative to neutral scenes, supporting the lingering emotional context perspective. These findings suggest that emotional spillover at encoding fosters the integration of subsequent neutral information into the same affective episode. Moreover, retrieval of such after cues may reinstate the emotional context of the original scene, facilitating access to its emotional tone and detail. Together, the results reveal that what follows an emotional event plays a privileged role in reconstructing its memory, highlighting the dynamic, temporally extended nature of emotional event representation.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic