2 Pictorial stimuli
As in Mirandola et al. (2014), a set of episodes (also named ‘‘scripts’’) with varying emotional valence were used as encoding stimuli. The material for each episode consisted of a sequence of 15 colour pictures depicting an ordinary event (e.g., going grocery shopping, waking up in the morning, etc.); out of them, 11 were actually shown, in chronological order, during the encoding phase, while the remaining 4 were used as distractors in the recognition test. The Appendix shows how one episode was presented during the encoding phase and which pictures were later used at the
memory test. Other photographs were created to depict three different outcomes for each episode. Each outcome was depicted by a sequence of two pictures and was either neutral, positive, or negative (positive and negative being associated with high arousal). Valence of the outcomes was counterbalanced across participants,such that each of the three alternative outcomes of each episodes was presented to one third of the participants. The nine episodes were presented one after the other without interruptions. In order to avoid primacy and recency effects, 5 script-inconsistent pictures were shown at the very beginning of the presentation, and other 5 at the very end. Each episode had different characters and settings.Four old (i.e. ‘‘targets’’) and four new (i.e. ‘‘distractors’’) photographs were presented for each episode during the recognition test; one of the four distractors was named causal antecedent, as it depicted the causal antecedent whose outcome had been presented during the encoding phase, while the other three were named gap-filling pictures. Overall, 45 old and 45 new photographs were presented during the recognition test in a randomized order.
Negative, positive, and neutral outcomes of each episode significantly differed in valence (ps