Untangling the threads of motivated memory: Independent influences of reward and emotion

Abstract Motivational and emotional influences on memory have been studied extensively; however, despite the link between these constructs, they have been studied in separate lines of research, with very little work examining their effects concurrently. The current study takes a novel approach to manipulate motivational and emotional influences orthogonally, and within the same task, to test their interplay on intentional memory formation. If emotion and reward motivation are tightly linked, they may rely on overlapping cognitive mechanisms, thus we would not expect emotion and reward to interact in memory. Alternatively, they could be distinct constructs and therefore would boost memory when both are included in the same experimental trial, above and beyond additive effects. To test these competing predictions, in Experiment 1, participants ( n = 180) completed an old/new recognition memory task with emotional (negative, positive) and neutral words intentionally encoded with high or low reward anticipation cues. In Experiment 2, participants ( n = 159) encoded emotional and neutral words with a high or low reward cue, but memory was tested with free recall using study–test blocks. The findings from both experiments converged. There were main effects of emotion and reward in generally hypothesized directions, but no evidence of an interaction between these factors. This is in line with the prediction that emotion and reward motivation are similar constructs. Their combination within a trial does not boost memory above and beyond either of these factors alone perhaps indicating these constructs have similar cognitive mechanisms.