Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience (May 2013)
A review of the neural and behavioral consequences for unitizing emotional and neutral information
Abstract
A special type of association, called a unitization, is formed when pieces of information are encoded as a single representation in memory (e.g., shirt and blue are encoded as a blue shirt; Graf & Schacter, 1989) and typically are later reactivated in memory as a single unit, allowing access to the features of multiple related stimuli at once (Bader et al., 2010; Diana et al., 2011). This review examines the neural processes supporting memory for unitizations and how the emotional content of the material may influence unitization. Although associative binding is typically reliant on hippocampal processes and supported by recollection, the first part of this review will present evidence to suggest that when two items are unitized into a single representation, memory for those bound items may be accomplished on the basis of familiarity and without reliance on the hippocampus. The second part of this review discusses how emotion may affect the processes that give rise to unitizations. Emotional information typically receives a mnemonic benefit over neutral information, but the literature is mixed on whether the presence of emotional information impedes or enhances the associative binding of neutral information (reviewed by Mather, 2007). It has been suggested that the way the emotional and neutral details are related together may be critical to whether the neutral details are enhanced or impeded (Mather, 2007; Mather & Sutherland, 2011). We focus on whether emotional arousal aides or inhibits the creation of a unitized representation, presenting preliminary data and future directions to test empirically the effects of forming and retrieving emotional and neutral unitizations.
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