Abstract
Establishing associations between pieces of information is related to the medial temporal lobe (MTL). However, it remains unclear how emotions affect memory for associations and, consequently, MTL activity. Thus, this event-related fMRI study attempted to identify neural correlates of the influence of positive and negative emotions on associative memory. Twenty-five participants were instructed to memorize 90 pairs of standardized pictures during a scanned encoding phase. Each pair was composed of a scene and an unrelated object. Trials were neutral, positive, or negative as a function of the emotional valence of the scene. At the behavioral level, participants exhibited better memory retrieval for both emotional conditions relative to neutral trials. Within the right MTL, a functional dissociation was observed, with entorhinal activation elicited by emotional associations, posterior parahippocampal activation elicited by neutral associations, and hippocampal activation elicited by both emotional and neutral associations. In addition, emotional associations induced greater activation than neutral trials in the right amygdala. This fMRI study shows that emotions are associated with the performance improvement of associative memory, by enhancing activity in the right amygdala and the right entorhinal cortex. It also provides evidence for a rostrocaudal specialization within the MTL regarding the emotional valence of associations.
Highlights
Episodic memory refers to the capacity to recollect individual events [1], which include perceptive dimensions of physical objects as well as the time and the place in which they occurred
All this disparate information has to be bound to create a unique coherent representation in memory [2]. This ability to bind and integrate disparate elements is an essential feature of episodic memory and has been referred to as associative memory [3]
Emotion generally increases the likelihood that single information is remembered, and this effect reflects in part the influence of the amygdala on encoding and consolidation processes occurring in the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe (MTL) cortices [27,28,29]
Summary
Episodic memory refers to the capacity to recollect individual events [1], which include perceptive dimensions of physical objects as well as the time and the place in which they occurred. All this disparate information has to be bound to create a unique coherent representation in memory [2]. Emotion generally increases the likelihood that single information is remembered, and this effect reflects in part the influence of the amygdala on encoding and consolidation processes occurring in the hippocampus and MTL cortices [27,28,29]. In light of previous work, we systematically examined MTL activations, as well as the interactions between amygdala activity and both hippocampal and MTL cortical activity
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