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Bridging EEG Oscillations and Autonomic Arousal in Emotional Memory Encoding

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

SEHAM KAFAFI¹ (), KRISTIN SANDERS¹, Nadia Nosek¹, Meredith Gallagher¹, Mia Utayde¹, Dan Denis², Jessica Payne¹; ¹University of Notre Dame, ²University of York

Emotional arousal often enhances memory for salient details at the expense of surrounding contextual information—a phenomenon known as the negative trade-off effect. While this effect is well documented in younger adults, less is known about how it changes during the transition to middle adulthood and its associated neural activity. The present study examined whether EEG oscillations and autonomic arousal jointly predict the negative trade-off effect across these age groups. Younger and middle-aged adults completed the negative trade-off task while EEG, pupillometry, skin conductance response (SCR), and heart rate (HR) were recorded during encoding. Subsequent recognition memory tested item accuracy. Time–frequency analyses focused on theta (4–8 Hz) power as a marker of associative memory, while autonomic indices (pupil dilation, SCR amplitude, and HR deceleration) indexed arousal. Preliminary results reveal that greater theta power and heightened autonomic arousal predicted better memory, although these effects were attenuated in middle-aged adults. Specifically, younger adults showed stronger theta–arousal coupling during successful memory of emotional objects and their paired backgrounds. These findings highlight the importance of examining the transition from younger to middle adulthood, a critical period when neural alterations occur that affect how emotional experiences are encoded into memory.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic