Emotional Modulation of Procedural Learning

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

Emotions often exert a powerful influence over memory abilities. The impact of emotion can be either detrimental or beneficial to the organism, depending on the intensity and kind of emotion being experienced. For instance, students who experience mild stress while studying for an exam tend to have better long-term retention of the material compared to those who experience high stress or none at all. Current theories posit that such effects are mediated by the interaction between brain systems specialized to process emotions with others that perform specific memory operations. Understanding how these systems interact can yield new insights into the mechanisms underlying memory benefits and losses as a function of ongoing emotional states. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Kevin LaBar's research will use modern cognitive neuroscience techniques to characterize the interaction of emotion and memory systems in the human brain. The research focuses in particular on situations where emotions affect memory without conscious awareness on the part of the individual. Until recently, unconscious processes were difficult to investigate in the human brain. Dr. LaBar and his students at Duke University will combine functional brain imaging techniques with physiological recordings of emotional arousal to tackle this complex problem. Human subjects will perform memory tasks, such as maze navigation, that require gradual learning over many trials while they experience different levels of emotional arousal. The researchers aim to show how emotion impacts the learning rates and strategies people use, even when they lack insight into the correct answer or solution to the task. The brain activity patterns will be analyzed and compared to measures of emotional physiology and memory performance to characterize the mental processes underlying unconscious emotional memories. Prior studies in this area have focused on conscious forms of emotional memory, as when individuals try to recall an emotionally evocative event from their past. However, many scholars believe that much of our mental life is governed by processes and influences that are not available to consciousness. The outcome of Dr. LaBar's experiments will lead to a broader theoretical appreciation for how emotion affects cognition in real-world contexts, since memory processes always operate across fluctuations of an individual's emotional and motivational states. Scientific advances fostered by the research may have practical implications for developing emotional rehabilitation strategies to counteract memory loss as well as for identifying ways to use emotion to enhance learning in educational settings. The funding will help support the training of students at Duke, who will gain valuable hands-on experience in the methods of cognitive neuroscience and the study of emotion. The results from the experiments will be broadly disseminated through publications, databases, and websites accessible to the public and to scientists and journalists at specialized conferences, where the research will gain greater national and international exposure.