Disgust learning and memory generalization across category exemplars and learning contexts

Disgust is an adaptive emotion that evolved to protect organisms from pathogens by motivating avoidance of contamination cues. Accumulating evidence suggests that disgust may influence memory for contamination-relevant information. The present research examined whether disgust learning is associated with changes in episodic memory across temporally related experiences using a category-conditioning paradigm. Across two experiments with undergraduate participants (Study 1: N = 61; Study 2: N = 59), neutral object categories were paired with either disgusting or neutral images, allowing emotional value to generalize broadly across category members. Study 1 showed that objects from disgust-conditioned categories were recognized more accurately (eta p & sup2; = 0.074) and with a marginally more liberal response bias (eta p & sup2; = 0.051) than neutral-category objects across learning stages. In addition, objects presented during conditioning were remembered better than those presented beforehand (eta p & sup2; = 0.084). These effects did not increase across longer retention intervals, suggesting that the observed memory differences were not strongly moderated by delayed consolidation processes. Study 2 examined whether disgust-conditioned categories would also be associated with memory differences for subsequently encountered category exemplars and new associative pairings. Objects from disgust-conditioned categories were again remembered more accurately (eta p & sup2; = 0.087), including those encountered after conditioning. In contrast, food items paired with disgust-conditioned objects were evaluated as less appetizing (Cohen's d = - 0.324) but remembered less accurately (eta p & sup2; = 0.095) than foods paired with neutral objects, which may reflect prioritization of avoidance over detailed encoding, potentially via adaptive biases favoring memory for appetitive cues. Together, these findings are consistent with the possibility that disgust learning influences memory and evaluation across related category exemplars and learning contexts.