Wednesday, February 6, 2008 12:40PM in room 1008 of the Humanities Building
Emotion-memory interactions: Evidence from brain and behavior
Elizabeth A. Kensinger Department of Psychology, Boston College and the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging
Many of us may believe that emotional experiences are remembered in a particularly vivid and detailed fashion. But are all aspects of an emotional experience equally likely to be remembered? What factors influence the types of details that we remember about emotional experiences and the aspects of an emotional event that are readily forgotten? In this talk, I will present evidence that emotion does not enhance memory for all aspects of an experience. Rather, emotion seems to convey benefits when remembering details that are closely linked to the source of emotional arousal but not when remembering details that are tangential to the emotional experience. For example, after seeing a snake in the forest, memory for the snake may be quite good but memory for the surrounding forest may be poor. I will describe some of the processes that influence these effects of emotion on memory, highlighting the importance of attention allocation during the event’s occurrence, the contribution of sleep-related memory consolidation processes, and the influence of our internal goals and motivations as we retrieve the details of past experiences.
Click here for a printable poster of talk
Wednesday, March 26, 2008, 12:40PM in room 1008 of the Humanities Building
Brain Systems for Learning and Controlling Skilled Behavior
Russ Poldrack UCLA Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences
In this talk, I will discuss what cognitive neuroscience tells us about the brain systems involved in acquiring new habits and skills, and how they relate to the brain systems involved in explicit memory for the past. I will outline work showing how multitasking during learning changes the systems that are involved in learning, in particular leading to less flexible memory representations. Finally, I will discuss the brain systems involved changing previously learned responses.