Laboratory of Brain Imaging (LOBI), Neurobiology Center, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland.
Laboratory of Psychophysiology, Department of Neurophysiology, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland.
Sci Rep. 2018 Feb 28;8(1):3808. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-21857-1.
It is widely accepted that people differ in memory performance. The ability to control one's memory depends on multiple factors, including the emotional properties of the memorized material. While it was widely demonstrated that emotion can facilitate memory, it is unclear how emotion modifies our ability to suppress memory. One of the reasons for the lack of consensus among researchers is that individual differences in memory performance were largely neglected in previous studies. We used the directed forgetting paradigm in an fMRI study, in which subjects viewed neutral and emotional words, which they were instructed to remember or to forget. Subsequently, subjects' memory of these words was tested. Finally, they assessed the words on scales of valence, arousal, sadness and fear. We found that memory performance depended on instruction as reflected in the engagement of the lateral prefrontal cortex (lateral PFC), irrespective of emotional properties of words. While the lateral PFC engagement did not differ between neutral and emotional conditions, it correlated with behavioural performance when emotional - as opposed to neutral - words were presented. A deeper understanding of the underlying brain mechanisms is likely to require a study of individual differences in cognitive abilities to suppress memory.
人们普遍认为，人与人在记忆力方面存在差异。而一个人控制自身记忆的能力取决于多种因素，其中包括所记忆材料的情绪属性。尽管人们已经广泛证实，情绪能够促进记忆，但情绪如何改变我们抑制记忆的能力仍不清楚。研究人员之间缺乏共识的原因之一是，在之前的研究中，人们在很大程度上忽略了记忆力表现的个体差异。我们在一项 fMRI 研究中使用了定向遗忘范式，在此范式中，被试观看中性和情绪性词语，并被指示记住或忘记这些词语。随后，对这些词语的记忆进行测试。最后，他们根据词语的效价、唤醒度、悲伤和恐惧程度进行评分。我们发现，记忆表现取决于指令，这反映在外侧前额叶皮层（外侧 PFC）的参与程度上，而与词语的情绪属性无关。虽然在中性和情绪条件下，外侧 PFC 的参与程度没有差异，但当呈现情绪性而非中性词语时，它与行为表现相关。要更深入地了解抑制记忆的潜在大脑机制，可能需要研究认知能力的个体差异。
