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Frontal midline theta in trait anxiety and associative memory

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 3:00 – 5:00 pm, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Tamari Shalamberidze¹ (shalambe@ualberta.ca), Jeremy B. Caplan¹, Kyle Nash¹; ¹University of Alberta

Frontal midline theta (FMT) activity is implicated in both memory and anxiety research. We tested the hypothesis that trait anxiety modulates FMT processes that, in turn, support associative memory performance and related FMT in healthy adults. Anxiety was assessed with the Behavioural Inhibition Scale (BIS), and memory was measured with an associative recognition task. Behaviour was not significantly affected by anxiety: BIS and d′ showed no reliable association (r(55)=0.191, p=0.144, BF10=0.58). However, higher anxiety was reliably linked to a reduced difference in FMT power during successful vs. unsuccessful encoding (subsequent memory effect, r(55) = -0.341, p = 0.009, BF10 = 4.40) and retrieval (retrieval success effect, r(55) = -0.295, p = 0.026, BF10 = 1.87), although less robustly. Critically, the effect was found for theta power but not when strict criteria for rhythmicity were applied, whereas the memory effects are typically rhythmic (e.g., Chen, 2017; Shalamberidze et al., in preparation). These findings suggest that trait anxiety modulates neural mechanisms that, despite sharing spectral characteristics with memory-related theta oscillations, are distinct processes.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions