Week 11-Emotional memory processes

Question 1

What are the short and long-term functions of the stress response? (Cahill & McGaugh, 1998)

Answer 1

• 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

Question 2

What is the role of emotional arousal in emotionally enhanced memory? (McGaugh, 2000)

Answer 2

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).

Question 3

What is the role of Amygdala activity in emotionally enhanced memory? (Murty et al., 2010)

Answer 3

• 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

Question 4

What is the impact of Amygdala lesions on emotionally enhanced memory? (Murty et al., 2010)

Answer 4

• 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

Question 5

What is the role of Medial Temporal Lobe activity in emotionally enhanced memory? (Murty et al., 2010)

Answer 5

-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

Question 6

What is the role of the Ventral Visual Stream in emotionally enhanced memory? (Murty et al., 2010)

Answer 6

• 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).

Question 7

What is the role of the Prefrontal Cortex in emotionally enhanced memory? (Murty et al., 2010)

Answer 7

• 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).

Question 8

What is the role of the Parietal Cortex in emotionally enhanced memory? (Murty et al., 2010)

Answer 8

• BA 7/40: reflexive attention driven by
  emotional salience.
• Pop-up effect of emotional stimuli which may benefit subsequent retrieval.

Question 9

What are 3 things emotional arousal enhances?

Answer 9

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).

Question 10

What are 2 things that emotional arousal impairs?

Answer 10

1.CONTEXTUAL DETAIL MEMORY (ITEM-CONTEXT ASSOCIATIONS)

2. MEMORY FOR TEMPORALLY ADJACENT NEUTRAL ITEMS
   * IT CAN BOTH ENHANCE AND IMPAIR

Question 11

How is high priority/salience information 1 impacted by emotionally enhanced coding? (Gallant et al., 2022)

Answer 11

• 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.

Question 12

How do the brain underpinnings in young adults impact emotionally enhanced coding? (Clewatt et al., 2018)

Answer 12

• 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.

Question 13

What was the procedure of this study for emotionally enhanced consolidation? (Sharot & Yonelinas, 2008)

Answer 13

• 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.

Question 14

What were the findings of this study for emotionally enhanced consolidation? (Sharot & Yonelinas, 2008)

Answer 14

• 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.

Question 15

What is the procedure of the study testing the spillover to conceptually related info in enhanced consolidation? (Dunsmoor et al., 2015)

Answer 15

• 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.

Question 16

What are the findings of the study testing the spillover to conceptually related info in enhanced consolidation? (Dunsmoor et al., 2015)

Answer 16

• Better memory for images from the category paired with shocks, irrespective of the phase in which they were presented (pre-conditioning, conditioning, post-
  conditioning.
• Better memory for those images paired with shocks during conditioning.

Question 17

What is the procedure of the study testing the spillover to conceptually related info in enhanced consolidation 2? (Starita et al., 2019)

Answer 17

• Encode pictures of animals/tools, half of which are paired with a shock (Day 1).
• Recognition for old items, similar lures (not seen in the study) and foils (Day 2).

Question 18

What are the findings of the study testing the spillover to conceptually related info in enhanced consolidation 2? (Starita et al., 2019)

Answer 18

• Participants show better memory for
  old items paired with shock (Target Effects) (i.e., they’re more likely to say they recognise it on day 1 whereas day 2 is more of a guess i.e., emotional arousal does not help with fine-grained contextual representation and only helps with broad memories of the item hence why emotional arousal impairs some aspects of memory).
• Participants show higher “false”
  memory for lures (Lure Effects) similar to shock-paired old items.

Question 19

What evidence is there for Recollection > Familiarity for emotionally enhanced memories? (Dolcos et al., 2005)

Answer 19

• A year after encoding, participants show higher recollection/Remember rates for emotional (vs neutral) pictures.
• There is no difference in familiarity/Know responses between the emotional and neutral pictures.
• For emotional pictures, there was higher
  retrieval success (RS) activity on Remember (vs Know) trials in the amygdala and hippocampus.

Question 20

What evidence is there for emotionally impaired “Objective” Recollection despite increased subjective recollection (Behaviour only) (Rimmele et al., 2011)

Answer 20

• Participants report greater subjective recollection (feelings of “remembering”) for emotional relative to neutral scenes.

..despite showing poorer associative
(item-context) and item memory on “objective” measure

Question 21

What evidence is there for emotionally impaired “Objective” Recollection despite increased subjective recollection (Brain + Behaviour) (Sharot et al., 2004)

Answer 21

• Participants report greater subjective recollection (R) for emotional relative to neutral scenes, despite the lack of statistically significant differences in accuracy.
• Subjective recollection/Remember for
  neutral scenes are linked to increased activity in the right parahippocampus (you expect this area would be involved and that it would facilitate better memory support for scenes).
• Subjective recollection/Remember for
  emotional scenes is linked to increased activity in the right amygdala.

Question 22

What evidence is there for emotionally impaired “Objective” but not for time/place? (Rimmele et al., 2012)

Answer 22

• Coloured dots placed on the “conceptual” centre of the image; dissociation between subjective recollection/R and “objective” (colour-related) memory performance.
• Similar objective memory for temporal and location-related details in Emotional vs Neutral scenes.

Question 23

What evidence is there for emotionally impaired memory? (Low Priority Info) (Sutherland & Mather, 2012)

Answer 23

• High/low salience letters are presented with an emotionally arousing vs neutral sound (P’s had to recall as many letters as they could).
• High salience letters are recalled better if presented with an emotionally arousing, rather than neutral sound.

Question 24

What evidence is there for emotionally impaired memory 2? (Low Priority Info) (Lee et al., 2014)

Answer 24

• Tones were conditioned to predict shock (CS+) or no shock (CS-).

-Presented with high-priority stimuli which were face stimuli (made to be more perceptually salient in bright yellow rectangle). Also presented with a sound before the shock.

-Threat enhances the priority of the high-priority stimulus and dampens the priority of the low-priority stimulus

• Relative to CS- tones, CS+ tones played before the display of a salient face and a less salient scene, were linked to greater
  recruitment of face, but reduced recruitment of scene, processing areas.

Question 25

Emotional memory theories: What is the GLUTAMATE AMPLIFIES NORADRENERGIC EFFECTS (GANE) MODEL (MATHER ET AL., 2016)

Answer 25

1. Top-down attention and high perceptual contrast make the cow high priority. The sound of a threat induces arousal.
2. That sense of the potential threat is associated with the release of noradrenaline from the LC-NE.
3. This release enhances the processing of the cow as high-priority and the release of glutamate.
4. Glutamate acts as a positive feedback which reaches a level triggering further amplifying noradrenaline.
5. The enhanced neurocognitiving processing of the cow is linked with greater employment of resources and synchronisation of the network involved in the high-priority stimulus.
6. Areas not processing the high-priority stimulus, receptors are binded by noradrenaline which has an inhibitory effect and subsequent excitatory effect.

-The release of noradrenaline leads to more blurring of the contextual information further enhancing the processing of the goal-relevant information

Question 26

What can Gane Explain?

Answer 26

• EMOTIONALLY ENHANCED ENCODING
• ENHANCED ITEM RECOLLECTION (> ITEM-CONTEXT ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY)
• EMOTIONALLY ENHANCED/IMPAIRED MEMORY (HIGH VS LOW PRIORITY)

Question 27

Emotional memory theories: What is the Emotional Binding Account (Yonelinas & Ritchey, 2015) (CHECK RECORDING?)

Answer 27

-Hippocampus involved in early perceptual processing of external environment of “binding items and context”.

-Parahippocampal cortex processes contextual information (where).

-Perirhinal cortex processes the items (what).

-The binding of a specific item to a specific arousal is the linking of the perirhinal cortex and amygdala for the binding of items and emotion (what the account is).

-The slower memory decay linked with items linked to the amygdala (emotion-item binding) show a slower decay compared to neutral item-context associations which depends on the hippocampus

Question 28

What can the emotional binding account explain?

Answer 28

• EMOTIONALLY ENHANCED CONSOLIDATION
• EMOTIONALLY ENHANCED RECOLLECTION (> FAMILIARITY)
• ENHANCED ITEM-EMOTION (> ITEM-CONTEXT) ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY

Question 29

Emotional memories: How does one go from typical cognition to psychopathology? (Levy & Schiller, 2021)

Answer 29

• Life-threatening experiences (panel A) can create an association between a neutral stimulus (e.g., blue car) and the perception of danger (panel B)
• The blue car-danger association can generalise to all cars OR repeated exposure to blue cars (in the absence of any danger) may lead to extinction learning i.e., the fear is gone (panel C).

Question 30

Emotional memories: How does one go from typical cognition to psychopathology in regard to brain underpinnings? (Levy & Schiller, 2021)

Answer 30

-Amygdala responds threat

-Hypothalamus in regard to HPA access which plays a role in stress relief

-Striatum in regards to forming an action to deal with the threat

-Hippocampus is involved with the context e.g., threat evoking vs safe stimuli to break the cycle of generalisation

-dACC threat maintenace

-vmPFC inhibitory control

-dIPFC cognitive regulation i.e., controlling stress response

Question 31

What are emotional memories like for those suffering with PTSD? (Gagne, Dayan & Bishop, 2021)

Answer 31

• Intrusive and vivid recollections of the traumatic event(s), accompanied by nightmares.
• Engage in counterfactual thinking: think about how the traumatic episode could have turned out differently.
• Ruminate on the traumatic episode.
• Frequent replay of the events preceding the traumatic episode.
• Hold more negative world views in the immediate aftermath of the traumatic event.
• Habitual tendency to ruminate may be a risk factor.

Question 32

What was the procedure for measuring goal-directed cognition (behaviour) for emotional memories for those with PTSD? (Catarino et al., 2015)

Answer 32

• Study phase: Participants studied 60 object-scene pairs.
• Think/No-Think: Participants were presented with the cue objects and asked
  to suppress or recall the associated scene (16:16).
• Final Phase: Cued memory recall. Participants’ verbal accounts were recorded for later coding.

Question 33

What were the findings for measuring goal-directed cognition (behaviour) for emotional memories for those with PTSD: Scene Identification? (Catarino et al., 2015)

Answer 33

• The Control Group shows better identification of scenes in the Recall relative to the Suppress/No-Think condition.
• The PTSD Group shows better identification of scenes in both the Recall and the Suppress/No-Think condition
  relative to baseline.
• No evidence of suppression-induced forgetting.
• “Inverted” suppression-induced forgetting.

Question 34

What were the findings for measuring goal-directed cognition (behaviour) for emotional memories for those with PTSD: Gist Memory? (Catarino et al., 2015)

Answer 34

• The Control Group showed suppression-induced forgetting.
• No effect in the PTSD Group.

Question 35

What were the findings for measuring goal-directed cognition (behaviour) for emotional memories for those with PTSD: Details Recalled? (Catarino et al., 2015)

Answer 35

• The Control Group showed suppression-induced forgetting.
• The PTSD Group showed only better memory for details from the “Recall” (rather than) Baseline scenes.