Age Differences in Incidental Learning of Emotional Information

Previous research has consistently shown a positivity bias in old adults, with a preference for remembering positive information, primarily in tasks involving intentional learning, such as free recall. 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 (VSL) task. Participants across two age groups (young and old 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 VSL performance between age groups, indicating that the ability to extract statistical regularities remains stable across the lifespan. Interestingly, while old adults exhibited a positivity bias in free recall, as expected, this pattern was not observed in the VSL task, in which both young and old adults showed enhanced recognition of negative stimuli. These results highlight that the advantage in VSL is specific to negative stimuli. Critically, they reveal a dissociation, where positive stimuli were better recalled but did not enhance VSL performance, whereas negative stimuli enhanced VSL but were not preferentially recalled. Together, these findings suggest that the positivity effect depends on the form of retrieval, and underscore the crucial role of the retrieval process in shaping how emotional valence influences memory across different age groups, even when learning is incidental.