Overview
- The Science Advances paper combines about 10 experiments using reward cues and next‑day surprise tests to examine selective recall in 648 participants.
- Memories formed after a salient event were strengthened in proportion to that event’s emotional or reward impact, indicating proactive enhancement.
- Memories from before the event were more likely to persist when they shared conceptual or perceptual features with the salient moment, indicating retroactive rescue.
- In one comparison, large rewards improved recall for certain images by roughly 5 percent over small rewards, and the boost diminished when linked items carried their own emotional weight.
- The authors present behavioral support for tag‑and‑capture–style consolidation and outline educational and clinical applications as underlying neural mechanisms are probed.