NCS-FO:Distortions in Memory for Aversive Naturalistic Events

NCS-FO:厌恶自然事件的记忆扭曲

• 批准号: 2123474
• 负责人: Vishnu Murty
• 金额: $ 99.99万
• 依托单位: Temple University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-09-15 至 2025-08-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2123474&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: NCS; FO; Distortions; Memory; Aversive

Memories are not exact records of past events; rather our emotional states can distort memories leading to accurate recall of the most intense parts of an event and misremembering of more mundane details. For example, imagine while eating brunch at a busy intersection you witness a horrific car accident. While you may have great memory for the anguish in the passenger’s face, you may not have great memory for how the car accident transpired (e.g., was the driver texting while driving?). Understanding how emotion distorts memories is of critical importance because as a society we use personal accounts of prior events to inform communication in both legal and media contexts. This project increases our understanding of how individuals form memories for complex emotional events by defining the features of learning that contribute to distortions in memory. The project leverages rodent and animal models of how emotional arousal influences brain structures underlying memory and extends them by employing more real-life, threatening events. There is accumulating evidence that emotional events heighten threat-related arousal, such as increases in sweating and heart rate, which can impair the function of regions known to construct episodic memories, such as the hippocampus. However, most laboratory based studies use static word lists or pictures as experimental stimuli, which preclude the ability to understand how threat changes individuals’ ability to construct accurate memory-based narratives of real-world situations. Threat may bias memory formation towards the most emotional parts of events while also encouraging the ignoring of mundane details (like where or when the event happened) which makes it difficult to accurately reflect on how events unfolded. A series of behavioral, psychophysiological, and neuroimaging experiments, using highly arousing naturalistic stimuli, address arousal’s role in fragmented memory by placing individuals in more complex, threatening environments than previous research. Understanding the intersection of emotion, arousal, and memory cohesion has broad implications for improving methods to make sure when individuals convey their interpretations of past events to broader audiences—such as an individual sharing their interpretation of a traumatic event to a news outlet or a courtroom—we can accurately determine which parts of their memories are more or less fallible. Alongside the research project are plans for the mentorship of a diverse body of undergraduate and graduate trainees, public outreach through theatre events and digital media, and a plan to develop collaborations with experts in eye-witness testimony, digital media, and memory research. This project translates models of arousal-mediated biases in episodic memory into the domain of naturalistic, ecologically-relevant stimuli in humans. Research in both rodents and humans shows that emotional memory is supported by a cascade of events which are triggered by threat detection in the amygdala, which then increases physiological arousal and noradrenergic tone in concert with facilitating medial temporal lobe-dependent encoding. These neuromodulatory signals are specifically thought to bias memory encoding towards cortical medial temporal lobe-based memory representations over hippocampal-dependent representations, which in turn results in greater memory for the most salient features of an emotional event at the expense of more mundane details. Critically, intact hippocampal function is necessary to form cohesive memories that maintain their temporal order, contextual details, and a continuous narrative. It follows that, due to amygdala involvement, memories of emotionally arousing events would lack typical markers of hippocampal-dependent memory such as a cohesive temporal narrative. However, prior research has precluded testing such hypotheses based on the use of more simplistic stimuli that are static and lack narrative structures (i.e., word lists, pictures). Emerging work in the cognitive neuroscience of memory has provided behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging techniques to assay memory processes that unfold over time by utilizing more complex memoranda that include a narrative structure. In the first set of studies, participants attend a highly arousing haunted house during the collection of physiological data and then complete free recall tests characterizing the cohesive structure of their memories. In a second series of studies, the investigators leverage neuroimaging methods during the encoding and free recall of horror and neutral movies clips to better understand the relationship between amygdala-medial temporal lobe interactions, physiological arousal, and memory distortion. In the final series of studies, the investigators manipulate individuals’ agency while playing a horror-themed video game, testing a novel hypothesis that agency may protect individuals from arousal-based memory distortions by providing them control over the event, a form of intrinsic emotion regulation. Thus, these studies expand our knowledge on emotional memory by moving beyond simple laboratory-based stimuli into more naturalistic memoranda (i.e., staged events, movie viewing, videogame play). Together, this project tests a model by which physiological arousal disrupts hippocampal-dependent encoding resulting in fragmented, distorted representations of past events which are less communicable to the public. Understanding the behavioral and neural mechanisms that drive memory distortions for complex, aversive events provides a foundation of knowledge to more accurately assess the veracity of individuals’ memories for traumatic events, and provides targets of remediation to reduce distortions in memory. Thus, the findings from this project inform practices of incorporating first-person narratives in service of societal well-being in legal and media contexts.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

记忆不是对过去事件的精确记录；相反，我们的情绪状态会扭曲记忆，导致我们准确地回忆起事件中最激烈的部分，而对更平凡的细节则会记错。例如，想象一下，当你在一个繁忙的十字路口吃早午餐时，你目睹了一场可怕的车祸。虽然你可能对乘客脸上的痛苦有很好的记忆，但你可能不太记得车祸是如何发生的（例如，司机是边开车边发短信吗？）了解情绪如何扭曲记忆是至关重要的，因为作为一个社会，我们使用个人对先前事件的描述来告知法律和媒体环境中的交流。这个项目通过定义导致记忆扭曲的学习特征，增加了我们对个体如何形成复杂情感事件记忆的理解。该项目利用啮齿动物和动物模型来研究情绪唤醒如何影响大脑结构的潜在记忆，并通过使用更多现实生活中具有威胁性的事件来扩展这些模型。越来越多的证据表明，情绪事件会增加与威胁相关的觉醒，比如出汗和心率的增加，这可能会损害构建情景记忆的区域的功能，比如海马体。然而，大多数基于实验室的研究使用静态单词列表或图片作为实验刺激，这妨碍了理解威胁如何改变个人对现实世界情境构建准确的基于记忆的叙述的能力。威胁可能会使记忆偏向于事件中最情绪化的部分，同时也会鼓励人们忽略世俗的细节（比如事件发生的地点或时间），这使得人们很难准确地反映事件是如何展开的。一系列行为学、心理生理学和神经影像学实验，使用高度唤醒的自然刺激，通过将个体置于比以往研究更复杂、更具威胁性的环境中，来解决唤醒在碎片化记忆中的作用。理解情感、觉醒和记忆凝聚力的交集对改进方法具有广泛的意义，以确保当个人向更广泛的受众传达他们对过去事件的解释时——比如一个人向新闻媒体或法庭分享他们对创伤性事件的解释——我们可以准确地确定他们记忆的哪些部分或多或少是错误的。除研究项目外，还计划对本科生和研究生学员进行多元化的指导，通过戏剧活动和数字媒体进行公众宣传，并计划与目击者证词、数字媒体和记忆研究方面的专家开展合作。该项目将情景记忆中唤醒介导的偏见模型转化为人类自然主义、生态相关刺激的领域。对啮齿类动物和人类的研究表明，情绪记忆是由一系列事件支持的，这些事件是由杏仁核中的威胁检测触发的，然后增加生理唤醒和去肾上腺素能调，同时促进内侧颞叶依赖编码。这些神经调节信号被认为会使记忆编码偏向于基于皮层内侧颞叶的记忆表征，而不是海马依赖的表征，这反过来会导致对情感事件最显著特征的记忆增加，而牺牲了更平凡的细节。重要的是，完整的海马体功能对于形成保持时间顺序、上下文细节和连续叙述的内聚记忆是必要的。由此可见，由于杏仁核的参与，情感唤起事件的记忆将缺乏海马体依赖记忆的典型标志，如连贯的时间叙述。然而，先前的研究已经排除了基于使用更简单的静态和缺乏叙事结构的刺激（即单词列表，图片）来测试这些假设的可能性。记忆认知神经科学的新兴研究提供了行为、计算和神经成像技术来分析记忆过程，这些记忆过程是通过利用包括叙事结构的更复杂的记忆来随着时间的推移而展开的。在第一组研究中，参与者在收集生理数据的过程中参加了一个高度刺激的鬼屋，然后完成了描述他们记忆的凝聚力结构的自由回忆测试。在第二个系列的研究中，研究人员利用神经成像方法，在编码和自由回忆恐怖和中性电影片段的过程中，更好地理解杏仁核-内侧颞叶相互作用、生理唤醒和记忆扭曲之间的关系。在最后一系列研究中，研究人员在玩恐怖主题的电子游戏时操纵个体的能动性，以测试一个新的假设，即能动性可以通过为个体提供对事件的控制（一种内在情绪调节形式）来保护个体免受基于觉醒的记忆扭曲。因此，这些研究扩展了我们对情绪记忆的认识，超越了简单的实验室刺激，进入了更自然的记忆（例如，上演的事件、看电影、玩电子游戏）。总之，这个项目测试了一个模型，通过这个模型，生理唤醒破坏了海马体依赖的编码，导致对过去事件的碎片化、扭曲的表征，而这些表征对公众来说是难以传播的。理解导致复杂、厌恶事件记忆扭曲的行为和神经机制，为更准确地评估个体创伤性事件记忆的准确性提供了知识基础，并为减少记忆扭曲提供了修复目标。因此，该项目的研究结果为在法律和媒体环境下将第一人称叙事融入社会福利服务的实践提供了信息。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。