Episodic integration under stress

压力下的情景整合

• 批准号: 424871835
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Lars Schwabe
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Arbeitsbereich Kognitionspsychologie
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2018-12-31 至 2021-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/424871835?language=en
• 关键词: Episodic; integration; under; stress

The integration of separate events to episodes is a fundamental process for episodic-autobiographical memory. Recent research shows that this integration is critically mediated by the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and hippocampus, with different subregions of the hippocampus representing episodes at a different degree of abstraction. Both the mPFC and the hippocampus are highly sensitive to stressful events and the hormones and neurotransmitters that are released in response to stressful encounters; stress is thought to reduce the activity in those areas. Whether stress affects the integration of events to episodes and which neural mechanisms are involved in the putative stress effect is completely unknown, despite the considerable implications of this issue, also for applied contexts. We hypothesize that stress impairs the integration of events to episodes and the neural processes supporting this integration, mainly in the mPFC and hippocampus. More specifically, we predict that stress will reduce the hippocampal mismatch-reaction and the hippocampal-prefrontal reorganization after insight into the relationship of previously unrelated episodes. Furthermore, we assume a stress-induced decrease in the hierarchical representation of episodic relationships along the hippocampal long axis. These stress-induced changes should result in impaired memory for the encoded episodes and their relationships after one week. In order to test these hypotheses, healthy volunteers will be exposed to a stressor or a control manipulation before they complete, in a MRI scanner, a task that probes episodic integration processes. The successful integration is tested immediately after the task as well as one week later. Beyond their crucial relevance for our understanding of episodic-autobiographical memory in general, the findings of this project might have important implications for stress-related mental disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, in which disintegrated and fragmented memories for events encoded under high stress conditions are very common.

将单独的事件整合为情节是情节自传体记忆的基本过程。最近的研究表明，这种整合主要由内侧前额叶皮层（mPFC）和海马体介导，海马体的不同亚区域代表不同抽象程度的事件。前额叶皮层和海马体对压力事件以及因压力遭遇而释放的激素和神经递质都高度敏感；人们认为压力会减少这些区域的活动。压力是否影响事件与事件的整合以及哪些神经机制参与假定的压力效应是完全未知的，尽管这个问题对应用环境也有相当大的影响。我们假设压力会损害事件与事件的整合以及支持这种整合的神经过程，主要是在 mPFC 和海马体中。更具体地说，在深入了解先前不相关事件的关系后，我们预测压力将减少海马失配反应和海马前额叶重组。此外，我们假设压力引起的沿海马长轴的情景关系的层次表示减少。这些压力引起的变化会导致一周后对编码事件及其关系的记忆受损。为了检验这些假设，健康志愿者在完成 MRI 扫描仪探索情景整合过程的任务之前，将受到压力源或控制操作。任务完成后立即以及一周后测试是否成功集成。除了对我们对情景自传体记忆的总体理解至关重要之外，该项目的发现可能对与压力相关的精神障碍（例如创伤后应激障碍）具有重要意义，在这种障碍中，在高压力条件下编码的事件的瓦解和碎片记忆非常常见。