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. 2012;3(3-4):150-9.
doi: 10.1080/17588928.2012.677421. Epub 2012 May 8.

The effect of emotional arousal and retention delay on subsequent-memory effects

Katherine R Mickley Steinmetz  1 , Katherine Schmidt, Halle R Zucker, Elizabeth A Kensinger
Affiliations

The effect of emotional arousal and retention delay on subsequent-memory effects

Katherine R Mickley Steinmetz et al. Cogn Neurosci. 2012.

Abstract

Memory for emotional experiences often persists longer than memory for neutral experiences. The present study examined how encoding processes influence memory retention across 0.5- or 24-h delays and whether these processes differ between emotionally arousing and neutral information. Participants encoded items during an fMRI scan. Immediately following the scan, and again 24-h later, participants performed a recognition memory test. The results revealed that, for emotionally arousing information, most regions showed a correspondence to subsequent-memory performance that was at least as strong after the long delay as it was after the short delay. For neutral items, by contrast, many more regions, including portions of the hippocampus and lateral prefrontal cortex, showed a stronger correspondence to subsequent-memory performance after the short delay than the long delay. These results suggest that the processes engaged at the moment of encoding have a longer-lasting relation to subsequent memory for emotionally arousing information than for neutral information.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
When collapsing across delay, the results replicated prior findings with regard to the regions that showed a Dm effect, collapsing across all items (panel A, regions in red) or those that showed a stronger Dm effect for emotionally arousing items than for neutral items (panel B, regions in yellow). The y value of the Talairach coordinates are indicated for each coronal slice.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Regions showing a Dm effect that interacted with delay (top panels) or that was delay invariant (bottom panel). All activations are shown at p .05). Red regions showed the delay-invariant Dm effect for neutral items, and yellow regions showed the delay-invariant effect for emotionally arousing items. Orange reveals the area of overlap of those two whole-brain maps. The y Talairach coordinates are indicated for each coronal slice.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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