University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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

Bogdan, Paul C.

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

Description

Title
Reconciling evidence regarding the impact of emotion on relational memory: Behavioral, eye-tracking, and brain imaging investigations
Author(s)
Bogdan, Paul C.
Issue Date
2024-03-04
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Dolcos, Florin
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Dolcos, Florin
Committee Member(s)
  • Dolcos, Sanda
  • Federmeier, Kara D.
  • Lleras, Alejandro
  • Schwarb, Hillary
Department of Study
Psychology
Discipline
Psychology
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
  • Emotion
  • memory
  • attention
  • temporal
  • association
  • multivariate analysis
  • fMRI
  • EEG
Abstract
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.
Graduation Semester
2024-05
Type of Resource
Thesis
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2024 Paul Bogdan

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