EMOTIONAL MODULATION OF MEMORY:THE HUMAN AMYGDALA(RMI)

描述(由申请者提供)：激动人心的事件通常比中立的事件更容易被记住，更生动。这种现象，即情绪记忆，在正常受试者中得到了广泛的研究，情绪记忆障碍是神经和精神疾病的标志，但人们对其发生的神经机制知之甚少。对人类和其他动物的研究表明，情绪记忆严重依赖于杏仁核，并指出了一些特定的未回答的问题。在信息处理过程中，杏仁核在什么时候调节情绪记忆？具体地说，杏仁核在什么时间窗口中对记忆进行调节--在刺激的初始处理早期，在较长的时间内，当关于这些刺激的信息在记忆中巩固时，甚至在提取过程中？我们的目标是通过检查60多名杏仁核受损的受试者的中性记忆和情绪刺激来解决这些问题，并将他们的表现与没有这种损伤的对照组的表现进行比较。我们将在不同的编码条件下监测眼睛凝视和心理生理，并在随后的不同时间点评估对刺激的记忆。我们还将在编码过程中通过实验直接操纵眼球运动对视觉刺激的影响，以考察它们对后续记忆的影响，并通过皮质醇诱导的应激源直接操纵躯体唤醒，以检验其对后续记忆的影响。此外，我们还将研究自传性情绪记忆与杏仁核损伤发生的时间点之间的关系。其他分析将检查杏仁核损伤造成的损伤是否与海马体损伤造成的损伤分离，杏仁核是否对基本和细节信息的记忆产生不同的影响，左右杏仁核对情绪记忆的贡献是否不同，以及是否存在性别差异。这些研究的结果将有助于我们理解神经和精神疾病中的情绪记忆障碍，可以与动物研究中关于情绪记忆基础科学的大量文献进行比较，并将通过确定杏仁核在人类情绪记忆中的因果作用来补充功能成像研究中发现的相关性。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Emotionally arousing events are often remembered better and more vividly than neutral events. This phenomenon, emotional memory, has been studied extensively in normal subjects, and impairments in emotional memory are a hallmark of neurological and psychiatric diseases, yet little is known regarding the neural mechanisms whereby it occurs. Studies in humans and other animals have shown that emotional memory depends critically on the amygdala, and point to specific unanswered questions. At what point in information processing does the amygdala modulate emotional memory? Specifically, during what window of time does the amygdala exert its modulation of memory-- early during initial processing of stimuli, throughout an extended time while information about these stimuli is consolidated in memory, or even during retrieval? We aim to address these questions by examining memory for neutral and for emotional stimuli in over 60 subjects who have damage to the amygdala, and comparing their performances to those given by controls without such damage. We will monitor eye gaze and psychophysiology during different encoding conditions, and assess memory for the stimuli at various points in time subsequently. We will also experimentally directly manipulate eye movements to visual stimuli during encoding to examine their influence on subsequent memory, and directly manipulate somatic arousal with a cortisol-inducing stressor to examine its influence on subsequent memory. Moreover, we will investigate autobiographical emotional memory, in relation to the point in time at which amygdala damage was acquired in life. Additional analyses will examine whether impairments due to amygdala damage are dissociable from those due to hippocampal damage, whether the amygdala differentially affects memory for gist and for detail information, whether left and right amygdala make different contributions to emotional memory, and whether there are gender differences. Findings from the studies will inform our understanding of emotional memory dysfunction in neurological and psychiatric disease, can be compared to a large literature on the basic science of emotional memory from studies in animals, and will complement the correlations found in functional imaging studies by establishing a causal role for the amygdala in human emotional memory.