The authors did a tremendous job revising their RR. This will be an interesting study.


I have only a few remaining comments that I hope will be helpful to the authors in sharpening some of their ideas:

1- Based on the authors’ response to one of my initial queries, it is now clearer that the authors are interested in using low arousal content (their decision to do so in relation to aging makes sense). Yet, I just want to caution that it is my understanding that some theoretical models in the literature pertain to arousal and not valence, e.g., ABC: Arousal-Biased-Competition model from Mather’s group. The authors do not explicitly reference ABC but the authors do cite “Mather, 2007, which is about “Emotional Arousal and Memory Binding.” I think the field is still trying to understand arousal versus valence effects (with some authors emphasizing arousal and others valence). Thus, I think it is crucial that the authors take great caution in applying theories of “emotion” to their paradigm if some of such theories are rooted in arousal, whereas their manipulation is chiefly one of valence. Indeed, you almost miss the low arousal decision in the methods and I might suggest making this decision more salient in the introduction, but if not, it would be good that this is discussed carefully in the discussion later. Thus, I am not suggesting a large change to the introduction but a subtle “pulling out” of this valence / arousal consideration or at least exercising a bit more caution so the reader is well aware of the nuances at play and caveats in relation to what aspects of the literature their own hypotheses stem from. Just to give one example (but there are certainly other places this can come up), the authors state: “In view of the low level of evidence in the literature regarding the combined effects of age and emotion on the memory for intrinsic item features and extrinsic item context, we are cautious in formulating our hypotheses about temporal memory and associative memory for context extrinsic to the items.” I might go farther and state “particularly for low arousal content.”

2- The authors made some improvements to the way they reference different types of temporal memory paradigms but they use the term “source memory” a little inconsistently: when discussing some of the paradigms “which list/session” [which to me are source memory paradigms], the authors do not consistently reference those as such, even though they use that term elsewhere. My read of their intro and/or the literature is that it is not so clear yet that “the beneficial effect of emotion on memory for temporal information seems to be robust when it concerns the moment when an event occurred” which is based on source memory findings, so I wonder if the authors want to (1) use more consistent terminology and (2) just soften this a little more. I understand that the authors believe the findings of Ceccato et al., 2022 (which did not observe an emotional memory effect in a source memory paradigm) might be due to the delay but for now this is speculation.

e.g., how about: “the beneficial effect of emotion on memory for temporal information seems to be robust when it concerns the moment when an event occurred, though this is based on a small number of studies with some exceptions”

3- If I may propose, the authors should refrain from using "he/she” but instead use either “he/she/they or another variant to highlight the diversity of gender and make the language more inclusive (n.b., I assume the authors plan to ensure gender is matched across young and old and may want to include that in the methods). Appologies for now pointing out earler. 

4- small typo: itemcontext should be “item context”

As outlined in this study preregistration, researchers will examine how positive vs. negative emotion modulate item memory, associative memory and temporal memory for younger vs. older adults. 

Participants will be shown short videos depicting everyday life activities with positive, negative and neutral pictures inserted into these videos to be shown for 2 s each at a random time. For each combination, participants will be asked to rate the compatibility between the video and the picture. After completing this phase and completing questionnaires during a 45-min delay, participants will be shown old and new images and tested on their item recognition. They will also be tested on their memory for where in each 20-s video the temporal placement of the picture occured, and their memory for which screenshot (from 5 different videos) was from the same video context as the one associated with the picture.

This is a well-designed study. My main concern was whether the temporal memory question was being tested appropriately given prior findings.

The authors previously discussed discrepancies between the findings from Ceccato et al. (2022) and Palumbo et al. (2018) and suggested that the 48-delay in one study but not the other might have contributed to the differences. A critical aspect of this long a delay is that it includes sleep. Jones, Schultz, Adams, Baran, & Spencer (2016) found that the emotional bias of sleep-dependent processing shifts from negative to positive in aging. Thus, increasing the planned delay from 45 min to a day or two, in order to include sleep in the delay period, may increase the likelihood of detecting age differences.

The current study also uses the Ceccato et al. (2022) results to motivate the investigation of the memory for temporal context. However, the Ceccato et al. study “exposed young and older adults to an experimental task in which they saw negative, neutral, and positive images in three sessions that occurred 48 hours apart.” This is quite different than the current study’s memory test where participants will be asked to indicate where in each 20-s short video context each picture was inserted. This is temporal context relative to each video, not relative to the participant’s sense of how long it has been since they viewed the pictures, which could have been the driving influence in Ceccato et al.

These prior results suggest that to more effectively test their hypotheses, the authors should consider including at least two encoding sessions that are each separated by overnight sleep.

The passage of time between different encoding contexts and the memory tests is relevant not only for the question about temporal memory, but also for the age-related positivity effect in item memory. “The second modification to this paradigm will be to increase the delay between encoding and retrieval phases from 10 min in the Palombo et al. (2021) paradigm to 45 min, as the age-related positivity effect in item memory has been shown to increase with time (e.g., Kalenzaga et al., 2016; Laulan et al., 2020).” It would of course be interesting to manipulate these time variables, but given the already many measures in the study, the key goal to focus on would be to select parameters that would increase power to detect the proposed outcomes. The prior research cited in the paper indicating that longer delays may increase the positivity effect and the Jones et al (2016) findings that sleep may differentially enhance negative memories in younger vs. older adults suggests that having 2 or more encoding sessions should not reduce power to detect the age-related positivity effect.

Mara Mather

(I sign all reviews.)

In a registered report, Dr. Laulan et al. plan to explore different facets of emotional memory in younger and older adults. The study is modelled after a previous report by Palombo et al., (2021), with methodological differences clearly noted. This RR is a clear, mostly well written registered report and could make for an important contribution to the literature. Many of the methodological choices are well conceived and rigorous. However, I do have some major and minor reservations about the reporting of prior literature, the rationale, hypotheses, and the approaches used. I hope my comments are constructive. 

*Intro:*

1.          The authors seem confident that emotion will impair associative memory even for positive stimuli. Is the literature so clear on this? Work by Christopher Madan shows that emotion can sometimes enhance associative memory for positive stimuli (e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6612425/). Does such work inform the hypotheses here and if not, why not?

2.          I do not think enough granularity when describing Petrucci and Palombo (2021)’s conclusions; the author of the current RR state that: “Petrucci and Palombo (2021) explained that the majority of studies on the subject have found that emotion enhances the memory of temporal information.” But it seems that Petrucci and Palombo (2021) highlight that temporal memory is not ‘one thing’ and the effects of emotion on this form of remembering look different depending on whether one is considering e.g., item order, source memory, or duration. It seems there are a lot of mixed findings and the literature is too nascent to draw conclusions. The footnote in the RR is helpful but I do not believe it goes far enough. The same concern applies to the statement: “the beneficial effect of emotion on memory for temporal information appears to be robust (Petrucci & Palombo, 2021)”. Can the authors tone this down a bit?

3.          Elsewhere, it seems that the authors are trying to argue that when you parse different types of intrinsic features (e.g., temporal versus non temporal), one can better explain inconsistencies in the literature. But the evidence provided in the intro is pretty thin on that front. Related, at times the study dances around the idea of comparing the effects of agingXemotion on intrinsic versus extrinsic features of an experience but the current study design is not optimized for that particular comparison as it potentially conflates temporal versus non temporal memory with intrinsic versus extrinsic—if we see different patterns in the different subtasks, would we be able to conclude it is due to the “intrinsicisity” of the task? 

4.          More critical, the findings of Palombo et al., 2021 appear a bit more nuanced than the authors allude to in the introduction. In that paper, the authors examine the bias versus sensitivity of temporal memory and find that the effects of emotion on temporal memory are driven by bias, not by precision. Indeed, to quote Palombo et al: “Critically, we note that in our study, negative emotion did not affect precision per se, but it did affect participants’ responding; in the neutral condition, there was a shift to later temporal estimates. In other words, when participants made temporal judgments in the neutral condition, they tended to judge the events as having happened later. By contrast, in the negative condition, participants’ responses were not consistently biased to be either early or late. If timing was encoded as an intrinsic feature that was enhanced by negative emotion, we might have expected to see enhanced precision in the negative condition, but instead, we observed comparable precision for both conditions. It is not clear what mechanism can account for the present results.” How does this nuance inform the author’s current hypotheses? Is this the right paradigm, to test the authors’ hypotheses? It seems that the authors are interested in temporal precision?

5.          With respect to item memory effects, my comments are more minor but the introduction raised a number of questions for me: Does emotion only affect only discrimination of items or does it also affect bias? (See important work by Dougal & Rotello, 2007.) The authors state that the memory advantage for emotional v neutral is greater for negative than for positive stimuli. How much of this is due to insufficient matching of arousal in prior studies between positive and negative? The authors cite the roles of attention and consolidation. What about the role of semantic relatedness (a la Deborah Talmi’s work?). I realize that the introduction is quite long already but it would be nice to include some of this granularity in the introduction. 

*Methodology:*

1.          Do the authors have any exclusionary criteria for data quality that they want to report (e.g., if a participant misses X trials; does not move around the scale during encoding, shows signs of inattention or rushing; ceiling effects)?

2.          How do the authors factor in within subject power? For example, by introducing positive stimuli, the authors are using less trials per condition than I have seen in other studies.  How does this compare to e.g., Palombo et al., 2021? Can the authors discuss this?

3.          I suggest the authors unpack H1-3 with respect to hypothesis b (“There is an age-related positivity effect, such that…” to unburden the reader)

4.          For Leclerc & Kensinger (2011) description, please first describe the scales (ranges from X to Y)—for example, is 9 the highest possible score on the scale?

5.          The authors did a nice job with stimuli matching. But it would be helpful to show e.g., superimposed histogram/density style plots of the arousal and valence ratings in younger and older adults for the items chosen to demonstrate not just that the mean is matched but that the distributions are also matched across groups. The SDs give some sense but is not complete. The range would be helpful too. This is not often seen in the literature (unfortunately) but would bolster the notion of tight matching at the manipulation level or at least demonstrate how tight the matching really is. 

6.          The authors state, “Finally, valence and arousal were matched across the two age groups of our study for each category of images (i.e., negative, neutral, and positive images) (all ps > .05).” Might you want to be more conservative (e.g., .2 or no greater than x effect size)

7.          It seems that the authors strived for low arousal images —why? (“Also, in selecting our images, we sought to keep the arousal of negative and positive images as low as possible (see Waring & Kensinger, 2009”). Don’t other studies try to aim for high arousal, high valence? Sorry if I misunderstood something. 

8.          Did the authors match the categories of images (landscapes, animals etc across images) as is common in emotional memory studies. These categories are provided in NAPS but can be done for IAPS too. This will keep more of a distinctiveness of items within condition and avoid confusability in the memory tasks, (I am sure the authors are aware that this can be an issue in emotional memory studies as emotional stimuli tend to come from narrower semantic or perceptual themes (see Deborah Talmi’s work on this). 

9.          The authors state that “Each image will be displayed for 3 s (e.g., see Palumbo et al., 2018)”—> did the authors mean Palombo et al., 2021 instead? And do timings need to be adjusted in light of the inclusion of older folks? 

10.       Are there any concerns about administering “emotional” type questionnaires in the delay period? Could that affect early consolidation?

11.       How will the sequential analyses pertain to the different outcomes--are sequential analyses valid in this way when one needs to observe significant effects across the board?

12.       In the study design template table, the reference to the amygdala seems ill fitting and uses reverse interference. 

13.       Perhaps I missed this but will participants have a chance to practice the task first? I think practice is important given the inclusion of older adults. 

14.       I do not have strong expertise in GEE; I am familiar with the approach and the analyses seem reasonable but I flag this as a place of weakness in my expertise 

15.       Minor: Consider rephrasing “power deficits” as “insufficient power”