Emotional Memory Performance Research Articles

Detailed analysis of the behavior and memory performance of middle-aged male and female CD-1 mice in a 3D maze

Fifty percent of CD-1 mice from both sex die by the end of 2 years. The survival rate is higher in females than in males. This high mortality rate is associated to the high susceptibility of this strain of mice to some immuno-pathologies and the high incidence of systemic amyloidosis. It is therefore possible that premature cognitive deficits can be observed in CD-1 mice. In the present study, we describe a novel method for assessing emotional responses and memory performance of young (4 months) and middle-aged (12 months) CD-1 mice of both sexes in a 3D spatial navigation task. Animals are introduced to the maze without preliminary habituation and trained in a working memory test. As expected CD-1 mice have a low number of entries to arms on their first exposure to the maze which confirm our previous report on the anxious trait of this strain compared to C57/BL6 mice. The measure of arm/bridge ratio suggests that anxiety induced by exposure to the maze persists much longer in middle-aged male mice compared to middle-aged female mice and compared to both young male and female mice. The measure of memory revealed that young female mice made significantly less arm repeats and more unique arm visits before first arm repeat than middle-aged female and male mice. There are also significant differences between young female and young male mice with the former committing fewer errors than the latter.

Emotional responses and memory performance of middle-aged CD1 mice in a 3D maze: Effects of low infrared light

Non-thermal near infra-red (IR) has been shown to have many beneficial photobiological effects on a range of cell types, including neurons. In the present study, a pretreatment with a daily 6 min exposure to IR1072 for 10 days yielded a number of significant behavioral effects on middle-aged female CD-1 mice (12-months) tested in a 3D-maze. Middle-aged mice show significant deficits in a working memory test and IR treatment reversed this deficit. Interestingly, the IR treated middle-aged group despite making less memory errors than sham middle-aged group spent longer time in different parts of the maze than both the young group (3-months) and sham-middle-aged group (12-months). Young mice appeared more anxious than middle-aged mice in the first sessions of the test. Exposure to IR appeared to have no significant effects upon exploratory activity or anxiety responses. However, it elicited significant effects on working memory, with the IR middle-aged mice being more considerate in their decision making, which results in an overall improved cognitive performance which is comparable to that of young CD-1 mice. The present study describes a novel method for assessing emotional responses and memory performance in a 3D spatial navigation task and demonstrates the validity of our new all-in-one test and its sensitivity to ageing and non-invasive beneficial IR treatment.

Encoding of emotional memories depends on amygdala and hippocampus and their interactions

We have studied patients with variable degrees of left hippocampal and amygdala pathology who performed a verbal encoding task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess the impact of pathology on emotional-memory performance and encoding-evoked activity. The severity of left hippocampal pathology predicted memory performance for neutral and emotional items alike, whereas the severity of amygdala pathology predicted memory performance for emotional items alone. Encoding-related hippocampal activity for successfully remembered emotional items correlated with the degree of left amygdala pathology. Conversely, amygdala-evoked activity with respect to subsequently remembered emotional items correlated with the degree of left hippocampal pathology. Our data indicate a reciprocal dependence between amygdala and hippocampus during the encoding of emotional memories.

The influence of sex versus sex-related traits on long-term memory for gist and detail from an emotional story

Recent findings demonstrate sex-related differences in the neurobiological mechanisms by which emotional arousal influences memory, and raise questions about the extent to which memory for emotional events may differ between males and females. Here we examine whether sex-related differences exist in the recall of central (gist) information and peripheral detail from an emotional story. Healthy subjects viewed a brief, narrated slide-show containing emotional elements in its middle section. One week later, they received an incidental multiple-choice recognition test for the story. Following the test, each subject completed the BEM Sex-Role Inventory, an assessment of sex-related masculine and feminine traits. The results reveal no differences in recall of either central or peripheral story information when considering the performance of actual men and women, but a significant difference when considering male and females as determined by their BEM test scores. “BEM” males (subjects with net male BEM scores) showed significantly enhanced recall of central emotional information. “BEM” females did not. Both groups showed significantly enhanced recall of peripheral emotional information, although this effect appeared larger in BEM females than in BEM males. The influences of “BEM” sex and type of information (central, peripheral) significantly interacted to influence emotional memory performance. These findings confirm the existence of sex-related influences in the recall of emotional information, and suggest that sex-related traits, rather than actual sex per se, may be a more sensitive indicator of these influences.