Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-21-2013

Journal

Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience

Issue

APR 2013

URL with Digital Object Identifier

10.3389/fnbeh.2013.00040

Abstract

It is well known that emotionally salient events are remembered more vividly than mundane ones. Our recent research has demonstrated that such memory vividness is due in part to the subjective experience of emotional events as more perceptually vivid, an effect we call emotion-enhanced vividness, or EEV. The present study built on previously reported research in which fMRI data were collected while participants rated relative levels of visual noise overlaid on emotionally salient and neutral images. Ratings of greater EEV were associated with greater activation in the amygdala, visual cortex, and posterior insula. In the present study, we measured BOLD activation that predicted recognition memory vividness for these same images one week later. Results showed that, after controlling for differences between scenes in low-level objective features, hippocampus activation uniquely predicted subsequent memory vividness. In contrast, amygdala and visual cortex regions that were sensitive to EEV were also modulated by subsequent ratings of memory vividness. These findings suggest shared neural substrates for the influence of emotional salience on perceptual and mnemonic vividness, with amygdala and visual cortex activation at encoding contributing to the experience of both perception and subsequent memory. © 2013 Todd, Schmitz, Susskind and Anderson.

Notes

© 2013 Todd, Schmitz, Susskind and Anderson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party graphics etc.

Originally published as:

Todd RM, Schmitz TW, Susskind J and Anderson AK (2013) Shared neural substrates of emotionally enhanced perceptual and mnemonic vividness. Front. Behav. Neurosci. 7:40. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2013.00040

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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