ARTICLE UPDATE - Effects of semantic relatedness on recall of stimuli preceding emotional oddballs.

Smith RM, Beversdorf DQ.

Journal of International Neuropsychological Society, 14, 620-628.

Semantic and episodic memory networks function as highly interconnected systems, both relying on the hippocampal/medial temporal lobe complex (HC/MTL). Episodic memory encoding triggers the retrieval of semantic information, serving to incorporate contextual relationships between the newly acquired memory and existing semantic representations. While emotional material augments episodic memory encoding at the time of stimulus presentation, interactions between emotion and semantic memory that contribute to subsequent episodic recall are not well understood. Using a modified oddball task, we examined the modulatory effects of negative emotion on semantic interactions with episodic memory by measuring the free-recall of serially presented neutral or negative words varying in semantic relatedness. We found increased free-recall for words related to and preceding emotionally negative oddballs, suggesting that negative emotion can indirectly facilitate episodic free-recall by enhancing semantic contributions during encoding. Our findings demonstrate the ability of emotion and semantic memory to interact to mutually enhance free-recall.

ARTICLE UPDATE - Dissociating love-related attention from task-related attention: An event-related potential oddball study.

Langeslag SJ, Franken IH, Van Strien JW.

Neuroscience Letters, in press

The present event-related potential (ERP) study was conducted to investigate the P3 component in response to love-related stimuli while controlling for task-related factors, and to dissociate the influences of both love-related and task-related attention on the P3 amplitude. In an oddball paradigm, photographs of beloved and friends served as target and distractor stimuli. Love-related and task-related attention were separated by varying the target and distractor status of the beloved and friends full factorially. As expected, the P3 amplitude was larger for beloved compared to friends and for targets compared to distractors. Moreover, task-related and love-related attention were unconfounded. These results are in line with findings that the P3 is modulated by both emotion- and task-related factors, supporting the view that the P3 amplitude reflects attention. Furthermore, this study validates the notion that romantic love is accompanied by increased attention for stimuli associated with the beloved, and also shows that this form of attention is different from task-related attention.

ARTICLE UPDATE - Event-related potential study of attention capture by affective sounds.

Thierry G, Roberts MV.

NeuroReport, 18, 245-248

Affective pictures trigger attentional responses in humans but very little is known about the processing of affective environmental sounds. Here, we used an oddball event-related potential paradigm to determine the saliency of unpleasant sounds presented among affectively neutral sounds. Participants performed a one-back task while listening to pseudo-randomized sound sequences comprising 70% neutral sounds, 15% unpleasant sounds of matched peak intensity, and 15% louder neutral sounds. Louder neutral sounds elicited a larger N1 component and a significant P3a variation with a central distribution. Unpleasant sounds did not affect early components but elicited a significant frontocentral P3a modulation. We conclude that affective environmental sounds spontaneously capture human attention but fail to modulate early perceptual processing when sound peak intensity is controlled.