Article

Often memory for emotionally arousing items is enhanced relative to neutral items
within complex visual scenes, but this enhancement can come at the expense of
memory for peripheral background information. This 'trade-off' effect has been
elicited by a range of stimulus valence and arousal levels, yet the magnitude of
the effect has been shown to vary with these factors. Using fMRI, this study
investigated the neural mechanisms underlying this selective memory for emotional
scenes. Further, we examined how these processes are affected by stimulus
dimensions of arousal and valence. The trade-off effect in memory occurred for
low to high arousal positive and negative scenes. There was a core emotional
memory network associated with the trade-off among all the emotional scene types,
however, there were additional regions that were uniquely associated with the
trade-off for each individual scene type. These results suggest that there is a
common network of regions associated with the emotional memory trade-off effect,
but that valence and arousal also independently affect the neural activity
underlying the effect.
CI - Copyright (c) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Langue : ANGLAIS