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Emotional contexts stored in long-term memory modulate delayed neural responses during scene recognition

Poster Session D - Monday, March 9, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Bo-Cheng Kuo¹ (), Ya-Chen Lin¹; ¹National Taiwan University

Emotion and memory both play crucial roles in guiding behavior, yet the neural mechanisms underlying their interaction remain incompletely understood. This fMRI study investigated whether emotional contexts stored in long-term memory (LTM) influence scene recognition. The experiment consisted of three tasks: a learning task (Day 1), a testing task (Day 2), and a delayed memory recognition task (Day X, where X indicates the number of days elapsed). On Day 1, participants (N = 25) encoded the spatial location of a target object in scenes presented with either negative or neutral emotional contexts. On Day 2, they performed a target detection task involving both previously learned (“old”) and novel (“new”) scenes. Several days later (Day X), participants underwent fMRI scanning while completing an old/new recognition task. Behavioral results revealed faster response times for old compared to new scenes, and for neutral compared to negative scenes. Interestingly, discrimination performance (d’ scores) for old versus new scenes was higher for neutral compared to negative scenes. fMRI analyses showed stronger and more widespread activation in the left prefrontal and bilateral parietal cortices for old versus new scenes, particularly in the negative condition compared to the neutral condition. Finally, activation magnitude in the parietal cortex was inversely correlated with the number of days elapsed, suggesting that shorter delays were associated with stronger neural responses to negative scenes. In conclusion, these findings highlight the interactive role of emotional context and LTM in shaping memory recognition over time.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions