Less Than Zero?

Abstract

Not all information encountered is equally important to remember. Some information may be valuable, while others may be irrelevant. Importantly, retrieving and acting upon some information may even have negative consequences. Research has shown that information associated with negative consequences when retrieved is remembered worse than information associated with positive consequences when retrieved. The current experiments address a hitherto understudied aspect of memory for values, namely about how neutral and negative valued information is remembered and which processes underly the encoding and retrieval of this information. Across four experiments, we presented participants with words and an associated positive, neutral, or negative point value. Participants thought the associated values would be added to their total score, thus incentivizing the recall of positive value words and forgetting of negative value words. However, at retrieval participants were told to ignore previously associated values and to try to retrieve as many words from the study phase as possible. Replicating previous research, we found superior retrieval for words associated with positive compared to negative values. More importantly for the current investigation, across four experiments, we found no evidence that words associated with negative values were remembered worse than words associated with a neutral value.