ERP correlates of target–distracter differentiation in repeated runs of a continuous recognition task with emotional and neutral faces

The emotional salience of faces has previously been shown to induce memory distortions in recognition memory tasks. This event-related potential (ERP) study used repeated runs of a continuous recognition task with emotional and neutral faces to investigate emotion-induced memory distortions. In the second and third runs, participants made more false alarms to distracters (repeated from previous runs). Emotion did not modulate the amount of errors, but the extent to which recollection was employed to maximise performance as reflected in the putative ERP correlate of recollection; the parietal old–new effect. Targets from all stimulus classes (positive, negative, neutral) were associated with parietal ERP memory effects, but this was also the case for correctly rejected negative distracters. This suggests that recollection was strategically used to correctly reject negative distracters (recall-to-reject). This finding is consistent with the view that facilitated recollection of negative stimuli may be used to decrease the susceptibility to memory errors induced by emotional salience.