Emotional interference-based forgetting in short-term memory. Cognitive inhibition of pleasant but not unpleasant biologically relevant distractors.

Emotional stimuli automatically recruit attentional resources. Although this usually brings more adaptive responses, it may suppose a disadvantage when emotional information is task-irrelevant and should be ignored. Previous studies have shown how emotional stimuli with a negative content exert a greater interference than neutral stimuli during a concurrent working memory (WM) task.

Working memory retrieval differences between medial temporal lobe epilepsy patients and controls: a three memory layer approach.

Multi-store models of working memory (WM) have given way to more dynamic approaches that conceive WM as an activated subset of long-term memory (LTM). The resulting framework considers that memory representations are governed by a hierarchy of accessibility. The activated part of LTM holds representations in a heightened state of activation, some of which can reach a state of immediate accessibility according to task demands.

Mere exposure effect can be elicited in transient global amnesia.

Transient global amnesia (TGA) is one of the most severe forms of anterograde amnesia seen in clinical practice, yet patients may show evidence of spared learning during the amnesic episode. The scope of spared learning in such a severe form of amnesia remains uncertain, and it is also unclear whether findings from single-case studies hold up in group studies of TGA patients. In this group study, we found evidence that extended the domain of spared learning in TGA to include the mere exposure effect, whereby enhanced preference is primed by prior exposure to stimuli.

Early prefrontal activation as a mechanism to prevent forgetting in the context of interference.

Objective: Recent research has focused on interference resolution deficits as the main cause of short-term memory decreases in aging. To determine whether activation of brain compensatory mechanisms occur during the encoding process in older people. Moreover, two different levels of interference (distraction and interruption) were presented during the maintenance period to examine how they modulate brain activity profiles.

Age-related effects in working memory recognition modulated by retroactive interference.

One of the main causes for age-related declines in working memory is a higher vulnerability to retroactive interference due to a reduced ability to suppress irrelevant information. However, the underlying neural correlates remain to be established. Magnetoencephalography was used to investigate differential neural patterns in young and older adults performing an interference-based memory task with two experimental conditions, interrupting and distracting, during successful recognition.

Age effects on retroactive interference during working memory maintenance.

The present study uses magnetoencephalography (MEG) to examine brain magnetic patterns in young and older adults who perform an interference-based working memory (WM) task with two experimental conditions; interrupting and distracting. Behaviourally, both types of retroactive interference significantly impair WM accuracy at recognition more in older adults than in young adults with the latter exhibiting greater disruptions by interruptors. MEG results revealed the presence of differential age-related and interference-related neural patterns.

[Memory and metamemory during transient global amnesia: a comparative study about long-term follow up].

Introduction: Diagnostic criteria of transient global amnesia (TGA) establishes that memory functioning has to be recovered in 24 hours. However, there are contradictory data about the existence of long-term sequelae. Furthermore, there is no consensus about which is the most suitable tool in order to use in the assessment of the follow up of these patients.

Explicit processing of verbal and spatial features during letter-location binding modulates oscillatory activity of a fronto-parietal network.

The present study investigated the binding of verbal and spatial features in immediate memory. In a recent study, we demonstrated incidental and asymmetrical letter-location binding effects when participants attended to letter features (but not when they attended to location features) that were associated with greater oscillatory activity over prefrontal and posterior regions during the retention period. We were interested to investigate whether the patterns of brain activity associated with the incidental binding of letters and locations observed when only the verbal feature is attended differ from those reflecting the binding resulting from the controlled/explicit processing of both verbal and spatial features.

Oscillatory activity in prefrontal and posterior regions during implicit letter-location binding.

Many cognitive abilities involve the integration of information from different modalities, a process referred to as "binding." It remains less clear, however, whether the creation of bound representations occurs in an involuntary manner, and whether the links between the constituent features of an object are symmetrical. We used magnetoencephalography to investigate whether oscillatory brain activity related to binding processes would be observed in conditions in which participants maintain one feature only (involuntary binding); and whether this activity varies as a function of the feature attended to by participants (binding asymmetry).

Retroactive interference in normal aging: a magnetoencephalography study.

Biomagnetic responses were recorded from healthy elderly subjects (55-67 years) performing a working memory task during recognition. The objective was to identify differential spatio-temporal brain activity patterns with magnetoencephalography by the presentation of two types of retroactive interference, active and passive. We obtained increased activity in the left medial temporal lobe and the left anterior ventral prefrontal cortex at early (100-200 ms) and medium latencies (300-400 ms) for the active interference group, and left anterior ventral prefrontal cortex showed greater activity at late latencies (700-800 ms) for the passive interference group.