Social learning of emotion and its implication for memory: an ERP study

Social learning of emotional salience from surrounding social cues is particularly advantageous under conditions of uncertainty. Yet, the neural mechanisms underlying this process and its consolidation into long-term memory remain poorly understood. In this two-day EEG study, we examined whether emotional salience from social cues (facial expressions) transfers to perceptually uncertain target images, and whether such learned salience is preserved in memory even after the social cues are removed. On Day 1 (learning session), preregistered analyses provided no evidence for an automatic emotional salience transfer across trials under the task's uniform perceptual uncertainty. Instead, exploratory ERP analyses indicated that the use of social cues depended on subjective perceptual uncertainty, indexed by participants' classification accuracy of the target image. P1 amplitudes in the learning session reflected this modulation. On Day 2 (test session), recognition performance and ERPs revealed evidence for additive emotional salience effects. EPN amplitudes were enhanced for accurately classified positive target images previously paired with social cues. In contrast, LPC amplitudes were reduced for negative target images in the social cue condition, independent of classification accuracy. Together, these findings suggest that the influence of social cues is contingent on subjective uncertainty. When internal valence judgments were strong (positive images), social cues added to emotional salience; when internal valence judgments were weaker (negative images), participants relied more heavily on the social cue, resulting in weaker memory encoding. PROTOCOL REGISTRATION: The stage 1 protocol for this Registered Report was accepted in principle on 08/11/2023. The protocol, as accepted by the journal, can be found at: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/TYQ84 .