Psychonomic Society

Friday, November 18, 2016 1:30-3:30 PM

Motivated Memory: Considering the Functional Role of Memory

Chair: Christopher R. Madan (Boston College)

Memory does not serve as a veridical recording of prior experiences that can be played back, instead many factors can lead some experiences to be more memorable than others. This leads to an important consideration: What is the functional role of memory? From this perspective, some experiences are more valuable in informing future behavior and should be selectively prioritized, such as those that evoke reward- or emotion-related processes. Here we broadly consider these processes as effects of motivational salience on memory. To capture the breadth of this topic, research highlighted in this symposium spans a variety of research approaches, including fMRI, cognitive aging, sleep-related consolidation, and cross-cultural differences.

Reward motivation facilitates hippocampal-dependent encoding and consolidation

Vishnu P. Murty (University of Pittsburgh), Alexa Tompary (New York University), Lila Davachi (New York University), & R. Alison Adcock (Duke University)

Motivation has been shown to facilitate episodic memory. Animal models suggest that these memory enhancements emerge through interactions of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and hippocampus both during and after encoding. I will present two fMRI studies detailing mechanisms guiding reward-motivated memory enhancements. In Study 1, I will show that rewarding contexts facilitate VTA hippocampal interactions resulting in enhanced hippocampal responses to salient, un-rewarded, events. Further, I will show that enhanced hippocampal responses is paralleled with increased memory for those salient events. In study 2, I will show that post-encoding changes in network connectivity of the VTA and hippocampus predict better long-term memory for reward-associated events. Critically, post-encoding VTA-hippocampal interactions specifically targeted sensory cortex that was associated with reward during encoding. These findings support a model by which VTA-hippocampal interactions enhance episodic memory for rewarding events by (1) enriching encoding and (2) selectively stabilizing reward memory following encoding.

Mechanisms of motivational modulation of attention in younger and older adults

Julia Spaniol (Ryerson University), Ryan S. Williams (Ryerson University), & Benjamin J. Dyson (University of Sussex)

Motivational signals bias attention across the lifespan. Significant evidence suggests that aging is associated with an attentional positivity effect, but the mechanisms underlying this age-related shift are still poorly understood. In the present study, we examined the link between phasic arousal, linked to noradrenergic neuromodulation, and the impact of gain and loss motivation on attention. Younger adults (aged 18–34 years) and older adults (60–82 years) completed the Attention Network Test (ANT; Fan et al., 2002), modified to include gain and loss incentives. The behavioral alerting index served as a marker of phasic arousal efficiency. For younger adults, this marker correlated positively with the effect of both gain and loss incentives on ANT performance. In contrast, for older adults, the correlation held for gain incentives only, suggesting an age-related reduction in phasic arousal to loss signals. We discuss this finding in the context of Adaptive Gain Theory (Aston-Jones, 1994).

Preferential consolidation of emotional components of memory during a nap is preserved with age

Sara E. Alger & Jessica D. Payne (University of Notre Dame)

Emotionally salient information is better remembered at the expense of less relevant details. Sleep increases the magnitude of this memory trade-off, preferentially preserving emotional components in young adults. Although both memory and sleep decline with age, little is known about whether their functional relationship changes. The current study compared changes in memory for negative and neutral components of scenes across a retention period containing an immediate or delayed nap versus wake. All subjects (18-64yrs) demonstrated the emotional memory trade-off effect. Interestingly, covarying for age, immediately napping led to the greatest increase in negative memory trade-off compared to both wake and delayed napping, indicating that sleep facilitated preferential consolidation of emotional components. There was a positive correlation between slow-wave sleep and negative object memory across all nap subjects, providing strong evidence that even as we age, sleep preserves salient information over less important details, despite general declines in memory and sleep.

Motivational salience and association-memory: Positive affect is not like the others

Christopher R. Madan & Elizabeth A Kensinger (Boston College)

Memory in daily life is not simply for occurrence of isolated information, but also for associations between different pieces of information. By using tasks such as paired-associate learning and cued recall to disentangle effects of item- and association-memory, previous research has demonstrated that negative affect, rewards, and motor-related information can all enhance memory for items, while simultaneously impairing memory for associations. Here we examined the influence of positive affect on item- and association-memory and found an enhancement of both memory for items and associations, relative to emotionally neutral information. This benefit of positive affect on association-memory was consistently demonstrated, revealing a different pattern than with equally arousing negative affect. These results provide strong evidence that positive information is processed differently than negative, and also differently than other types of motivationally salient information, such as rewarding or motor-related information.

Culture motivates what is remembered accurately and erroneously

Angela Gutchess (Brandeis University)

Although individual differences in cognition have long been recognized, it is only recently that the influence of cultural background has begun to be investigated as a potential source of individual differences in cognition. Culture can be thought of as a lens that shapes what information an individual is motivated to attend to and encode into memory, as well as a filter for the strategies and retrieval biases that can operate on that information. Thus, measures of memory can serve as assays of what is valued and prioritized by a culture. The talk will include data illustrating that cultures can differ in their accurate memory for specific perceptual details and in the engagement of neural regions supporting memory. In addition, the talk will establish that cultural groups can differ in their tendency to commit memory errors based on the content of information, and consider the impact of aging on cultural differences.