inference guides retroactive effects of arousal on memory

Aversive category conditioning has been shown to retroactively increase recognition of related items through arousal-mediated reactivation. Schemas and incongruent, one-shot associations have also been shown to mediate reactivation, though in separate paradigms and through disparate neural pathways. Here, we design two experiments to test the relationship between the contingency structure of aversive learning and retroactive memory enhancements. Both experiments consist of a preconditioning phase in which participants view items congruent and incongruent with scenes belonging to two separate real-world schemas. Experiment 1 then associates an entire schema with aversive shock, with participants showing improved recognition for previously-encountered congruent, but not incongruent, items. Experiment 2 associates a schema with shock while maintaining one scene as safe, which leads to participants showing improved high-confidence recognition for all previously-encountered items, both congruent and incongruent. Individual differences in how strongly participants generalize shock expectancy ratings across the entire schema – that is, whether they infer the individual scenes or the schema broadly to be the source of the aversion – were then correlated with the memory effects from Experiment 1.