EMOTIONAL MODULATION OF MEMORY BY THE HUMAN AMYGDALA

描述（由申请人提供）：唤起注意的事件通常比中性事件更好，更生动。这种现象，情绪记忆，已经在正常受试者中进行了广泛的研究，情绪记忆障碍是神经和精神疾病的标志，但关于它发生的神经机制知之甚少。对人类和其他动物的研究表明，情绪记忆在很大程度上取决于杏仁核，并指出了一些尚未回答的问题。杏仁核在信息处理的哪个阶段调节情绪记忆？具体来说，杏仁核在什么时间窗口发挥其对记忆的调节作用--在最初处理刺激的早期，在有关这些刺激的信息在记忆中巩固的整个延长时间内，甚至在提取过程中？我们的目标是解决这些问题，通过检查记忆的中性和情绪刺激的60多名受试者谁有损坏的杏仁核，并比较他们的表现与控制没有这样的损害。我们将在不同的编码条件下监测眼睛注视和心理生理学，并随后在不同的时间点评估对刺激的记忆。我们还将在编码过程中直接操纵眼动视觉刺激，以检查其对后续记忆的影响，并直接操纵皮质醇诱导应激源的躯体唤醒，以检查其对后续记忆的影响。此外，我们将研究自传体情绪记忆，与杏仁核损伤在生活中获得的时间点有关。其他分析将检查杏仁核损伤是否与海马损伤无关，杏仁核是否对要点和细节信息的记忆有不同的影响，左杏仁核和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。这些研究的发现将为我们了解神经和精神疾病中的情绪记忆功能障碍提供信息，可以与动物研究中情绪记忆基础科学的大量文献进行比较，并将通过建立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.