Emotional arousal impairs association memory: roles of prefrontal cortex regions
- 1University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, 20246 Hamburg, Germany
- 2University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2R3, Canada
- 3University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG5 1PB, United Kingdom
- Corresponding author: tsommer{at}uke.de
Abstract
The brain processes underlying impairing effects of emotional arousal on associative memory were previously attributed to two dissociable routes using high-resolution fMRI of the MTL (Madan et al. 2017). Extrahippocampal MTL regions supporting associative encoding of neutral pairs suggested unitization; conversely, associative encoding of negative pairs involved compensatory hippocampal activity. Here, whole-brain fMRI revealed prefrontal contributions: dmPFC was more involved in hippocampal-dependent negative pair learning and vmPFC in extrahippocampal neutral pair learning. Successful encoding of emotional memory associations may require emotion regulation/conflict resolution (dmPFC), while neutral memory associations may be accomplished by anchoring new information to prior knowledge (vmPFC).
Footnotes
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Article is online at http://www.learnmem.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/lm.052480.120.
- Received August 18, 2020.
- Accepted November 13, 2020.
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