Emotional Modulation of Episodic Memory in School-Age Children and Adults: An Event-Related Potential Study.

Sarah Massol,Cora Caron,Hanna Chainay,Nicolas Franck,Caroline Demily

doi:10.3390/brainsci11121598

Abstract

The Emotional Enhancement of Memory (EEM) has been well-demonstrated in adults, but less is known about EEM in children. The present study tested the impact of emotional valence of pictures on episodic memory using behavioral and neurophysiological measures. Twenty-six 8- to 11-year-old children were tested and compared to 30 young adults. Both groups participated in pictures’ intentional encoding tasks while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded, followed by immediate free recall tasks. Behavioral results revealed a general EEM in free recall performances in both groups, along with a negativity effect in children. ERP responses revealed a particular sensitivity to negative pictures in children with a late emotion effect at anterior clusters, as well as a greater successful encoding effect for emotional pictures compared to neutral ones. For adults, the emotion effect was more pronounced for positive pictures across all time windows from the centro-parietal to the frontal part, and localized in the left hemisphere. Positive pictures also elicited a greater successful encoding effect at anterior clusters in adults. By combining behavioral and neurophysiological measures to assess the EEM in children compared with adults, our study provides new knowledge concerning the interaction between emotional and memory processes during development.

Highlights

The emotional enhancement of memory (EEM), or having a better memory for emotional than neutral information, has been extensively demonstrated in adults using various paradigms with different types of information or memory tasks
A few event-related potentials (ERPs) studies have investigated emotional responses in children, and have shown that children as young as 5 years old elicit an adult-like emotion effect with an enhancement of the late positive potential (LPP) in response to negative and positive pictures compared to neutral ones, in the middle and late time windows at the centro-parietal sites [32,33]
Additional analyses showed that children exhibited an emotion effect with a more positive amplitude of the LPP especially for negative pictures compared to neutral ones during the W4 and W5 time windows, which is 1200 until 2000 ms after the stimulus onset, at the frontal and fronto-central clusters

Summary

Introduction

The emotional enhancement of memory (EEM), or having a better memory for emotional than neutral information, has been extensively demonstrated in adults using various paradigms with different types of information (pictures, words, stories, etc.) or memory tasks (for reviews, see [1,2]). Consistent with the cognitive mediation hypothesis, several psychological studies have suggested that the effects of emotion on memory can be partly explained by cognitive factors, such as increased attention toward emotional stimuli [7]. In this respect, emotional stimuli capture more attentional resources than neutral ones and are, more efficiently encoded in memory [8]. To better understand the EEM, the late positive potential (LPP), thought mainly to index greater attentional engagement toward emotional stimuli, was examined in these studies. LPP can index the EEM during encoding, suggesting that attentional engagement toward emotional stimuli is a reliable predictor of the EEM, even though some ERP modulations may vary depending on stimulus materials and experimental paradigms (for a review, see [11])

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