The relationship between subjective vividness and remembered visual characteristics of emotional stimuli across the lifespan.

Abstract

Episodic memories are characterized by the vividness of their recollection. Recent findings show that low-level visual properties can quickly fade from memory and that more vivid memories are associated with less fading. However, further work is needed to clarify this effect over longer delays and how it may shift based on the emotional valence of a stimulus, as well as one's age. Here, participants (n = 307, aged 19-78, recruited in 2023-2024) incidentally encoded positive, negative, and neutral images shown at different levels of color saturation, contrast, and hue. At a next-day recognition test, images identified as old were rated on subjective vividness and then reconstructed based on the remembered visual information from encoding. More arousing images were recollected with more subjective vividness, and vividness ratings were primarily associated with biases in reconstructed color saturation, but in both instances, the coherence between these measures diminished with increasing age. Negative and neutral images showed memory fading (color saturation underestimations) at lower levels of subjective vividness, and neutral images additionally showed evidence of fading via contrast reconstruction. Positive images did not show evidence of fading and were reconstructed with inflated color saturation and contrast at all levels of vividness relative to negative and neutral images. Our findings show that subjective vividness is not uniformly related to remembered low-level visual information but differs depending on the visual information reconstructed, the emotionality of an experience, and individual differences such as age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).