Encountering an emotional landmark on the route for a better spatial memory: What matters, valence or arousal?

This study explores the impact of the interplay between the valence and arousal dimensions of landmarks on spatial memory. Participants were asked to watch a movie of a walk in a large urban virtual environment with landmarks that differed in terms of arousal and valence across conditions (high-arousal-positive; low-arousal-positive; high-arousal-negative; low-arousal-negative). Their route knowledge was assessed through a direction recall task, and their survey knowledge by asking them to plot the position of each landmark encountered during the route on a map. Results showed that the presence of positive landmarks benefited route knowledge, whereas high arousing ones impaired it. However, no clear effect of the landmarks' valence and arousal was observed on survey knowledge. In addition to supporting some of the previous evidence while extending it to more complex and real-like environments, these new results call into question the relevance of the dimensional approach to emotions classically adopted in this type of studies.