Age differences in incidental learning of emotional information.

Abstract

Previous research has consistently shown an age-related positivity effect, in which older adults show relatively less negativity and/or relatively greater positivity in memory compared with younger adults. This study examined age-related differences in incidental learning of emotional stimuli, specifically examining how emotional valence influences memory within the framework of the visual statistical learning task. Participants across two age groups (young and older adults) viewed streams of object images with varying emotional valences (negative, positive, neutral) organized into triplets, unaware of their underlying structure. Subsequently, participants completed both a recognition test, assessing their ability to identify previously encountered triplets, and a free recall task. Results revealed no significant differences in overall visual statistical learning performance between age groups, indicating that the ability to extract statistical regularities remains stable across the lifespan. Interestingly, the pattern differed across tasks: In visual statistical learning, both age groups showed a robust advantage for negative over neutral triplets and no benefit for positive stimuli, whereas in free recall, older adults preferentially remembered positive images. This suggests that age-related positivity effects, which reliably emerge in free recall, do not necessarily generalize to prediction-based statistical learning and that negative emotion remains particularly effective in supporting the incidental extraction of regularities across the lifespan. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).