Everyday our brains are inundated with seemingly mundane details, and remembering all of them is impossible. Unfortunately in some cases, previously acquired memories can become important later, even if they did not seem important at the time. For instance, in situations where they have an effect on the future health or safety of the individual. In this study, Dunsmoor et al. (2012) ask the question: can seemingly unimportant information be strengthened and remembered later if connected to an emotional learning task? This is a really interesting question to ask, as if the answer is yes it speaks to an evolutionarily adaptive quality humans have that has yet to fully be explored.
For this study, participants were placed in a within-subjects design that used a form of fear conditioning in order to determine …show more content…
I know from class that fear conditioning is usually used because we understand the brain’s response to fear more so than we understand how the brain reacts to other emotions like happiness, but I think it would have been interesting if this study had considered a different method for creating emotionally salient memories (Gluck et al., 2014). Testing other kinds of emotional learning may also lead to a deeper understanding of the exact qualities required of an emotional learning task for it to strengthen previously acquired memories. To increase the specificity of this experiment, I think that they should have also tested to see whether emotions other than fear would still cause memories to be strengthened. Then the results would have allowed me to see if there was evidence that not only fear, but other emotions- based learning could also increase the salience of memories. In addition to that, I would also triple the amount of participant, as to increase external
For this study, participants were placed in a within-subjects design that used a form of fear conditioning in order to determine …show more content…
I know from class that fear conditioning is usually used because we understand the brain’s response to fear more so than we understand how the brain reacts to other emotions like happiness, but I think it would have been interesting if this study had considered a different method for creating emotionally salient memories (Gluck et al., 2014). Testing other kinds of emotional learning may also lead to a deeper understanding of the exact qualities required of an emotional learning task for it to strengthen previously acquired memories. To increase the specificity of this experiment, I think that they should have also tested to see whether emotions other than fear would still cause memories to be strengthened. Then the results would have allowed me to see if there was evidence that not only fear, but other emotions- based learning could also increase the salience of memories. In addition to that, I would also triple the amount of participant, as to increase external