Disgust is a basic emotion that provides pathogen avoidance. Because pathogens are invisible, it is crucial to remember the objects containing pathogens to avoid them. Accordingly, research have shown that disgusting stimuli are enhanced in memory. However, it is important to evaluate this memory effect by considering the disgust-specific properties. Firstly, disgust has a contagious nature, and disgust-associated neutral stimuli can also be expected to have a memory advantage. Secondly, while previous studies explained memory advantage for disgust with automatic attentional capture, several studies have demonstrated that disgust causes attentional avoidance. In the present study, two experiments were conducted using the categorical conditioning paradigm in which objects from two different categories were associated with disgusting (US+) or neutral pictures (US-). That is, images from one category (CS+) were followed by disgust-related pictures while the others (CS-) were followed by neutral pictures. In Experiment 1, episodic memory performance was tested by giving participants a recognition test either immediately after the learning phase or 24-h later. ROC analysis showed that there were no accuracy or bias differences between CS+ and CS- stimuli on the immediate test, but CS+ stimuli had a memory advantage on the delayed test. In Experiment 2, participants’ eye movements were recorded during categorical conditioning to evaluate the attentional processes during the learning/encoding phase. Results showed that disgust caused attentional avoidance, not attentional capture, for both disgust-associated neutral stimuli and inherently disgusting stimuli. To conclude, this study demonstrated that disgust-associated neutral stimuli acquired a memory advantage despite attentional avoidance.