Title
Retrieved emotional context influences hippocampal involvement during recognition of neutral memories.
Abstract
It is well documented that emotionally arousing experiences are better remembered than mundane events. This is thought to occur through hippocampus-amygdala crosstalk during encoding, consolidation, and retrieval. Here we investigated whether emotional events (context) also cause a memory benefit for simultaneously encoded non-arousing contents and whether this effect persists after a delay via recruitment of a similar hippocampus-amygdala network. Participants studied neutral pictures (content) encoded together with either an arousing or a neutral sound (that served as context) in two study sessions three days apart. Memory was tested in a functional magnetic resonance scanner directly after the second study session. Pictures recognised with high confidence were more often thought to have been associated with an arousing than with a neutral context, irrespective of the veridical source memory. If the retrieved context was arousing, an area in the hippocampus adjacent to the amygdala exhibited heightened activation and this area increased functional connectivity with the parahippocampal gyrus, an area known to process pictures of scenes. These findings suggest that memories can be shaped by the retrieval act. Memory structures may be recruited to a higher degree when an arousing context is retrieved, and this may give rise to confident judgments of recognition for neutral pictures even after a delay.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1016/j.neuroimage.2016.08.069
NeuroImage
Keywords
Field
DocType
AAL,E-,FWE,ITI,MNI,PPI,R-,ANOVA,ROI,SVC
Context-dependent memory,Crosstalk,Cognitive psychology,Psychology,Memory consolidation,Amygdala,Parahippocampal gyrus,Hippocampal formation,Hippocampus,Encoding (memory)
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
143
1053-8119
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Atsuko Takashima1286.08
Frauke van der Ven210.68
Marijn C. W. Kroes300.68
Guillén Fernández412724.34