Even affective changes induced by the global health crisis are insufficient to perturb the hyper-stability of visual long-term memory

Past studies of emotion and mood on memory have mostly focused on the learning of emotional material in the laboratory or on the consequences of a punctate catastrophic event. However, the influence of a long-lasting global condition on memory and learning has not been studied. The COVID-19 pandemic unfortunately offered a unique situation to observe the effects of prolonged, negative events on human memory for visual information. One thousand online subjects were asked to remember the details of real-world photographs of objects to enable fine-grained visual discriminations from novel within-category foils. Visual memory performance was invariant across time, regardless of the infection rate in the local or national population, or the subjects’ self-reported affective state using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). Thus, visual memory provides the human brain with storage that is particularly resilient to changes in emotional state, even when those changes are experienced for months longer than any imaginable laboratory procedure.