Week 11-Emotional memory processes Flashcards
What are the short and long-term functions of the stress response? (Cahill & McGaugh, 1998)
- External/internal stimuli are interpreted
for meaning (e.g., Threat/Safety) - The interpretation of the stimuli guides
the subsequent cognitive-emotional
response and autonomic stress
hormone response
Release of the adrenal hormones,
adrenaline and corticosterone aid:
* immediate coping with stress
* future coping with stress by
enhancing explicit memory of the
stressful experience (e.g., how you are encoding it with the vividness of the threat)
-Short-term=influence immediate coping behaviour
-Long-term=influence memory storage
What is the role of emotional arousal in emotionally enhanced memory? (McGaugh, 2000)
Most existing evidence underscores
the role of emotional arousal in enhancing:
* Encoding
* Consolidation
via hormonal-brain systems interaction
-Hippocampus has glucocorticoid receptors so can receive cortisol (so there is a direct effect and indirect effect of brain structure through the amygdala).
What is the role of Amygdala activity in emotionally enhanced memory? (Murty et al., 2010)
- Successful encoding of emotional memories is linked to bilateral activations
- Retrieval of emotional (rather than neutral) events is associated with greater activation.
- Recruitment during the encoding and retrieval of emotional memories scales with vividness and richness of item-specific details.
-Emotional memories are associated with a enhanced recollection of memories and items.
-This is all correlational evidence
What is the impact of Amygdala lesions on emotionally enhanced memory? (Murty et al., 2010)
- Patients with amygdala lesions show deficits in arousal-mediated memory consolidation.
- The severity of amygdala damage correlates with deficits in emotional but not neutral declarative memory.
-Points to a very likely contribution of the amygdala in emotionally enhanced episodic memory coding and retrieval
What is the role of Medial Temporal Lobe activity in emotionally enhanced memory? (Murty et al., 2010)
-Close to the amygdala
- Damage to the hippocampus (excluding the amygdala) does not reduce the emotional memory advantage (points that the amygdala rather than the hippocampus has causal contributions to the episodic processes).
- Emotional memory enhancement is linked to bilateral hippocampal, entorhinal and perirhinal activations.
- The wider MTL activations may be a by-product of the amygdala-(para)hippocampal connectivity.
- Stronger amygdala-MTL connectivity is related to better (delayed) memory for emotional (> neutral) events (i.e., emotionally enhanced memory).
- Left PHG has been implicated in contextual fear conditioning (i.e., acquiring fear responses in a specific context).
-All correlational evidence
What is the role of the Ventral Visual Stream in emotionally enhanced memory? (Murty et al., 2010)
- May be relevant to emotionally enhanced visual processing, which, in turn, may be linked to more robust encoding.
- Amygdala-ventral visual stream interactions, supported by enhanced structural and functional connectivity (i.e., strong structural and functional connections).
- Amygdala-visual cortex activation is
linked to perceived vividness at the encoding and recall of emotional events
(Todd et al., 2020) (You would expect any involvement in the ventral visual stream to be involved in the visual representations that are emotionally enhanced).
What is the role of the Prefrontal Cortex in emotionally enhanced memory? (Murty et al., 2010)
- BA 45/47: Implicated in semantic
elaboration, which may partly account for
the emotional memory advantage. - BA 10: abstract goal representation and
switching from an internal to an external
focus of attention (important with regards to signalling threatening stimuli in the external environment).
What is the role of the Parietal Cortex in emotionally enhanced memory? (Murty et al., 2010)
- BA 7/40: reflexive attention driven by
emotional salience. - Pop-up effect of emotional stimuli which may benefit subsequent retrieval.
What are 3 things emotional arousal enhances?
1.ENCODING
2.CONSOLIDATION
3. RECOLLECTION (> FAMILIARITY) (i.e., more so than familiarity). (The sense of recollection associated with the ability of projecting oneself back into the present moment WHEREAS familiarity is just the awareness of knowledge in the past).
What are 2 things that emotional arousal impairs?
1.CONTEXTUAL DETAIL MEMORY (ITEM-CONTEXT ASSOCIATIONS)
- MEMORY FOR TEMPORALLY ADJACENT NEUTRAL ITEMS
* IT CAN BOTH ENHANCE AND IMPAIR
How is high priority/salience information 1 impacted by emotionally enhanced coding? (Gallant et al., 2022)
- Younger (19-29 yrs) and older (60-85 yrs)
adults were presented with neutral pictures
of scenes and body parts which varied in
perceptual salience. - The pictures were preceded by a sound
which was negative arousing (e.g., gun shots) /neutral non-arousing.
-Some pictures were high salience and were manipulated perceptually by the level of contrast (i.e., high salience=high contrast)
Manipulation check:
* Younger and older adult participants did not differ in their ratings of the arousing
and neutral sounds, respectively.
Results:
* Stronger results were found for the body (relative to the scene) stimuli.
- Younger adults showed better memory and greater EBA (extrastriate body area) activity on high (vs low) salience body stimuli on arousing trials only.
- Older adults showed better memory and greater EBA activity on high (vs low) salience body stimuli on non-arousing trials only.
-The interaction between arousal and perceptual salience is reflected cognitively in regards to performance but the recruitment of EBA that is uniquely responsive.
How do the brain underpinnings in young adults impact emotionally enhanced coding? (Clewatt et al., 2018)
- Participants saw the transparent picture of an object overlapped onto the background scene. Their task was to remember the scene.
- Pictures were preceded by a money loss
“threat” cue of half the trials, and by a square on the remaining half. - High-priority information (i.e., target scenes) is remembered better under threat (relative to neutral conditions).
- Presentation of high priority information (i.e., target scenes) under threat is linked to greater activation in category-selective (i.e., parahippocampal cortex) and arousal-relevant (i.e., locus coeruleus) brain areas.
What was the procedure of this study for emotionally enhanced consolidation? (Sharot & Yonelinas, 2008)
- On Day 1, participants judged a set of pictures on colour and complexity.
- On Day 2, they judged an additional set of pictures on colour and complexity, then completed memory tests for both picture sets.
What were the findings of this study for emotionally enhanced consolidation? (Sharot & Yonelinas, 2008)
- There was no immediate effect of emotion on memory performance.
- There was a delayed improvement in recognition for the emotional items, which was driven increased Remember responses.
- There was no effect of emotion of memory for context (associative memory) (i.e., task performed for each item).
-Context=whether they were asked to make a visual or colour perceptual judgement.
What is the procedure of the study testing the spillover to conceptually related info in enhanced consolidation? (Dunsmoor et al., 2015)
- Younger adults completed all three study phases (pre-conditioning, Pavlovian conditioning, post-conditioning) on the same day.
- Pre-conditioning: Participants classified 30 images of tools and 30 images of animals.
- Pavlovian conditioning: 30 images from each category (animals/tools, 60 images in total) were presented, with 20 (from one category) paired with mild electric shocks.
- Post-conditioning: Participants classified 30 new images of tools and 30 new images of animals.