Mood Driven Reinforcement Learning: How Induced Affective States Influence Learning and Memory

Abstract

How does mood affect learning and memory? Studies have shown how mood can influence attention, which can in turn influence learning and memory. Here, I modified the reinforcement learning paradigm by Rouhani et al. (2018) to investigate how an induced positive affect and an induced negative affect can modulate prediction errors’ effects on episodic memory formation and learning. Participants were induced into either a negative or positive mood through emotionally charged videos. They then underwent a learning phase, in which they had to estimate the expected value of two types of image categories (indoor and outdoor images). Each learning trial consisted of a trial-unique image pair (cue and outcome image) and a reward after estimation. Participants then underwent an old-new item recognition test for images previously seen in learning. The experiment showed that mood had no effect on learning rate or overall episodic memory formation. Instead, mood had subtle effects, such as by affecting reaction time and selectively enhancing memory for mood-congruent events in the positive affect condition.