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How emotional appraisal during encoding impacts subsequent memory reactivation and recall.

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Vishnu Murty¹, Lena Skalaban¹; ¹University of Oregon

Past work shows that emotional stimuli are recalled differently than neutral stimuli, such that gist-based features are enhanced in memory. However, these studies used intrinsically emotional stimuli leaving open how emotional appraisal influences memory representations for neutral memoranda. To investigate how emotional goals may influence memory reactivation and recall, we employed a movie-watching paradigm that asks participants to make continuous self-paced ratings about either emotional (negative to positive) or perceptual (brightness) changes they observed during encoding. We then asked participants to passively watch all movies again, but this time every 10-seconds the screen went blank while the audio continued to play –– cueing reactivation. Finally, we asked participants to free recall as many details as they could about the movies from both conditions. Connectivity and representational similarity analyses will be conducted on an fMRI version of the study currently being collected. We predict that movies that were appraised in the emotional versus perceptual condition will show more connectivity between the hippocampus and semantic memory networks reflecting gist-based processes during encoding and be reactivated cortically in this semantic network. The degree of connectivity and reactivation will be related to free recall of more semantic details. Meanwhile, movies appraised in the perceptual versus emotional condition will show connectivity between visual networks and the hippocampus and be reactivated early-on in the ventral visual stream which will be predictive of higher recall of perceptual details. Overall, we hope to better characterize how emotional appraisal may impact brain representations and subsequent memory behaviors.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic