Recapitulation of emotional source context during memory retrieval

Abstract

Recapitulation involves the reactivation of cognitive and neural encoding processes at retrieval. In the current study, we investigated the effects of emotional valence on recapitulation processes. Participants encoded neutral words presented on a background face or scene that was negative, positive or neutral. During retrieval, studied and novel neutral words were presented alone (i.e., without the scene or face) and participants were asked to make a remember, know or new judgment. Both the encoding and retrieval tasks were completed in the fMRI scanner. Conjunction analyses were used to reveal the overlap between encoding and retrieval processing. These results revealed that, compared to positive or neutral contexts, words that were recollected and previously encoded in a negative context showed greater encoding-to-retrieval overlap, including in the ventral visual stream and amygdala. Interestingly, the visual stream recapitulation was not enhanced within regions that specifically process faces or scenes but rather extended broadly throughout visual cortices. These findings elucidate how memories for negative events can feel more vivid or detailed than positive or neutral memories.

Memory-related functional connectivity in visual processing regions varies by prior emotional context

“…Memories for emotional events—negative events in particular—are often accompanied by a feeling of re-experience [4; 5] potentially driven by greater recapitulation of those encoding processes at the time of retrieval. In our prior work [6] we demonstrated that recollected verbal stimuli previously encoded in a negative pictorial context indeed showed more encoding-to-retrieval overlap compared to stimuli encoded in a positive or neutral context. Further, consistent with related work from our lab [7] using degraded line-drawing images of previously encoded full color images, we demonstrated that the valence of the previous encoded context led to differences in regions of the brain that showed this recapitulation.…”

“…Second, we were interested in examining functional connectivity at retrieval, again with a particular interest in whether valence patterns would emerge in this connectivity. Although the same alternate hypotheses existed for connectivity—there might be minimal, or no, effects of emotion, or the dominant effect might be related to arousal—based on our findings of greater recapitulation of visual processing regions during retrieval of stimuli previously encoded in a negative context [6; 7] and in line with tenants of our “NEVER” model of emotional memory [15], we predicted that network connectivity correlated with visual processing regions would vary by emotional valence and would be stronger for stimuli encoded in a negative context.…”

“…An alternate hypothesis is that the stronger pattern to emerge would be one that characterizes arousal, not differentiating negative and positive valence. Yet our prior results [6; 7] led us to hypothesize that valence-specific retrieval patterns would emerge. Second, we were interested in examining functional connectivity at retrieval, again with a particular interest in whether valence patterns would emerge in this connectivity.…”

“…In this prior work [6; 7] these valence differences were analysed using univariate approaches with specific contrasts to probe for valence effects in memory recapitulation. While these results reflect differences in activation between these conditions, they do not provide information about the dominance of these valence patterns within the data, nor do they provide evidence about the functional connectivity of these neural regions.…”

“…Our first aim was to determine whether PLS would reveal dominant valence patterns during retrieval of neutral stimuli previously encoded in an emotional context, using a dataset that previously revealed valence differences in univariate analyses [6]. Given that no emotional content is re-presented at the time of retrieval, one hypothesis would be that valence effects would be small, or even non-existent.…”