Notice of RetractionEffects of emotion on item memory and spatial source memory

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org.

This study examines effects of emotion on item memory and spatial source memory. During learning, neutral, positive and negative words were randomly presented on either the left or right side of a computer screen, and participants were asked to memorize each word and its location on the screen. Immediately after learning, participants first conducted free recall, and then took tests for recognition and spatial source memory. The results are as follows: 1) Recall for both positive and negative words were better than for neutral words. 2) No significant difference was found between recognition for neutral, positive and negative words. 3) For females, spatial source memory for positive words was better than for neutral words; however, no significant difference existed between negative and neutral words. For males, no significant difference existed between neutral, positive and negative words. Therefore, the effect of emotion on item memory depends on the task of memory test, and the effect of emotion on spatial source memory may be modulated by gender. The findings have implications for establishing a theoretical model concerning the effect of emotion on memory.