Fig. 1.

The hypothesized relationships between subjective memory vividness and encoded high-level visual features (e.g., objects) and low-level visual features (e.g., visual salience), accounting for positive modulatory effects of emotional salience (orange stars). Tested relationships are shown with solid arrows, whereas relationships that are predicted but not tested here are shown with dashed arrows. We predicted that negative emotion would enhance the encoding and subsequent fidelity of both low-level and high-level visual representations, even as these features are forgotten (↓). We also predicted that emotional salience might transfer to represented visual salience (indicated by the orange arrow), creating a positive bias relative to neutral images, but we remained agnostic (?) about whether bias in represented visual salience would change with forgetting. We further predicted that subjective memory vividness would be positively influenced (+) by the bias or magnitude of represented visual salience, in addition to the fidelity of visual features.