Variations in prestimulus neural activity predict the emotion-enhanced memory effect.

Here, we report evidence that electrophysiological neural activity preceding the onset of emotional pictures can predict whether they will be remembered or forgotten 24 h later, whereas the same effect was not observed for neutral pictures. In contrast to previous research, we observed this effect using a paradigm in which participants could not predict the emotional or the neutral content of the pictures before their onset. These effects were obtained alongside significant behavioural effects of superior recognition memory for emotional compared with neutral items.

The effects of negative emotion on encoding-related neural activity predicting item and source recognition.

We report here a study that obtained reliable effects of emotional modulation of a well-known index of memory encoding--the electrophysiological "Dm" effect--using a recognition memory paradigm followed by a source memory task. In this study, participants performed an old-new recognition test of emotionally negative and neutral pictures encoded 1 day before the test, and a source memory task involving the retrieval of the temporal context in which pictures had been encoded. Our results showed that Dm activity was enhanced for all emotional items on a late positivity starting at ~400 ms post-stimulus onset, although Dm activity for high arousal items was also enhanced at an earlier stage (200-400 ms).

Material-specific neural correlates of memory retrieval.

It is well established that the neural activity engaged during memory retrieval varies with the kinds of information that are recovered. Less well established is whether this activity reflects online recovery of information, or processes operating downstream of successful recovery. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to adjudicate between these alternatives, emphasizing that an online recovery account would be supported if material-specific indices of successful retrieval occurred no later than a material-independent index of recollection, the left-parietal ERP old/new effect.