Reconciling evidence regarding the impact of emotion on relational memory: Behavioral, eye-tracking, and brain imaging investigations

The effects of emotion on memory are wide-ranging and powerful, but they are not uniform. Although there is agreement that emotion enhances memory for individual items, how it influences memory for the associated contextual details (relational memory, RM) remains debated. The prevailing view suggests that emotion impairs RM, but there is also evidence that emotion enhances RM. To reconcile these diverging results, the present research carried out a series of studies, with special consideration to four key elements: (1) employing greater specificity in testing RM, distinguishing between subjective and objective RM accuracy, (2) accounting for emotion-attention interactions, (3) using stimuli with enhanced realism and integration, (4) considering not just commonly studied spatial RM but also temporal RM, as the associations between sequential stimuli. Challenging prevailing views, the studies showed enhancing effects of arousal, impairing effects of arousal, and effects of arousal contingent on the organization of stimuli: First, emotion enhanced subjective RM, separately and when confirmed by accurate objective RM. Second, emotion impaired objective RM through attention-capturing, but it enhanced RM accuracy when attentional effects were statistically accounted for using eye-tracking data or task manipulation. fMRI evidence shows that emotional enhancement of RM was associated with increased activity in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC), along with increased intra-MTL and vlPFC-MTL functional connectivity. Finally, investigation of temporal RM revealed how the order of stimuli interacts with the effect of arousal: Participants encoded associations between negative stimuli and subsequent neutral stimuli more strongly than associations between negative stimuli and preceding neutral stimuli. ERP evidence points to the role of attentional mechanisms in driving these behavioral effects along with common mechanisms responsible for both spatial and temporal RM. In addition to these conceptual findings, the thesis presents methodological developments to broadly enhance the study of psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Bogdan, Paul C.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Dolcos, Florin
• Dolcos, Sanda
• Federmeier, Kara D.
• Lleras, Alejandro
• Schwarb, Hillary

• Emotion
• Memory
• Attention
• Temporal
• Association
• Multivariate Analysis
• Fmri
• Eeg

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2024 Paul Bogdan

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124488

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F124488