< Symposia

Symposium Session 12 - Emotion and the organization of temporal context in memory

Chair: Joseph Dunsmoor¹; ¹University of Texas at Austin
Presenters: Daniela Palombo, Chantelle Cocquyt, Andy Lee, Gahyun Kim, Kristin Langohr, Roger Johansson, Mikael Johansson, Joseph Dunsmoor, Patrick Laing, Regina Lapate, Jingyi Wang, Sydney Fortner, Nadezhda Barbashova, Mengsi Li

A defining feature of episodic memory involves remembering not only what happened, but when it happened. While emotion can enhance the vividness and recollection of an event, its effect on the temporal organization of event memory is nuanced. Emerging evidence is beginning to reveal how the subjective experience and neural representations underlying emotional events alter the temporal scaffolding of memory. This symposium brings together complementary perspectives on the effects of emotion on the temporal organization of human memory. Daniela Palombo will present new work showing that transitions from negative-to-neutral events elicit richer memory than transitions from neutral-to-negative events, highlighting the importance of temporal adjacency within an episode on memory structure. Andy Lee will present new eye tracking and functional fMRI data revealing how emotion impacts temporal distance memory within event sequences of events, showing that subjective temporal distance scales with the intensity of emotion experienced. Joseph Dunsmoor will present work synthesizing across a number of fear conditioning paradigms showing retroactive and proactive distortion on temporal context memory, whereby individuals consistently misremember neutral stimuli as belonging to the emotional learning context. Finally, Regina Lapate will present new behavioral and fMRI data showing that real-life negative (versus positive) events are remembered with lower temporal accuracy and are linked to distortions in entorhinal event representations that track temporal context. Collectively, this work underscores converges on the central theme that emotion does not merely modulate memory for the details of what happened but dynamically restructures the temporal framework upon which event memories are based.

Presentations

Unlocking emotional memories through temporally adjacent cues

Daniela Palombo^1,2, Chantelle Cocquyt^1,2; ¹Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, ²Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health, University of British Columbia

Emotionally intense events, such as those involving fear or joy, rarely occur in isolation. Indeed, they ebb and flow alongside neutral moments, creating a dynamic and interconnected narrative. Later, encounters with the neutral elements of an experience—such as a face in the crowd or an everyday object—can be a powerful force in triggering the reinstatement of the rich emotional experience. Here we ask: Does the temporal positioning of encoded cues affect the richness of later emotional memory retrieval? The literature offers multiple viewpoints regarding the fate of the neutral stimuli that bookend an emotional experience and, more specifically, how effectively they might cue memory. On the one hand, binding prior neutral content to an ensuing emotional experience is essential to creating predictive associations. On the other hand, emotions can linger and potentially influence how subsequent neutral content is experienced (and its potency as a retrieval cue). To shed light on this issue, the present study employed a novel “triplets” paradigm, where emotional events—in this case, negative events—were bookended by neutral content. At test, participants were cued with either the “before” or “after” neutral content for recall. Results across two independent samples largely converged in their findings that cueing with “after” content improved emotional memory retrieval, including specificity, precision, and emotional integrity (but not temporal order). Our study suggests that the richness of emotional memory retrieval is not just affected by what triggers memory, but also “when” those triggers were first encoded.

Elucidating the impact of arousal and valence on memory for elapsed time

Andy Lee¹, Gahyun Kim¹, Kristin Langohr^1,2, Roger Johansson², Mikael Johansson²; ¹Department of Psychology (Scarborough), University of Toronto, Canada, ²Department of Psychology, Lund University, Sweden

When remembering our previous experiences, we tend to over- or underestimate the time that elapsed between events. This distortion in temporal distance memory is suggested to be influenced by a number of factors including emotion, given its known impact on the subjective experience of time. Notably, few studies have investigated how emotion impacts memory for elapsed time in the context of event sequences. Little is currently known about the relative effects of arousal and valence, and the potential cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying their impact are unclear. Across a series of studies, we presented participants with blocks of images of different emotional content and, after each, asked them to rate the temporal distance between two target items. We first found that images with high compared to low emotional content (i.e., negative-high arousal vs. positive-low arousal images) were associated with longer subjective distances. A follow-up study revealed that this effect was driven by arousal rather than valence, and that the longer distances associated with blocks of high arousal images were unlikely to be explained by enhanced item memory, a difference in perceived time, or greater variations in semantic content. Eye-tracking data highlighted changes in pupil dilation and fixation times across arousal levels and their potential relationship to temporal distance. Finally, a fMRI study revealed differential patterns of activity associated with arousal and valence during encoding and temporal distance retrieval. Taken together, our findings further our understanding of how emotion can affect our memories for temporal information.

Fear conditioning selectively distorts the temporal organization of episodic memory

Joseph Dunsmoor^1,2, Patrick Laing¹; ¹Department of Psychiatry, University of Texas at Austin, ²Department of Neuroscience, University of Texas at Austin

Fear conditioning is considered an implicit form of learning that typically involves learning and expressing an association between neutral and biologically salient stimuli. Prior research on the role of time in conditioned learning has largely focused on the temporal relation between conditioned and unconditioned stimuli. In our lab, we have modified the typical conditioning paradigm to incorporate trial-unique semantic exemplars encoded before, during, and after Pavlovian fear conditioning, and later test participants on temporal judgements for when exemplars with respect to the experimental phase. Across 17 multi-session fear conditioning experiments (N = 474), we embedded trial-unique semantic exemplars before, during, and after conditioning and later assessed temporal source judgments. We observed robust and reliable evidence of temporal source misattribution: participants systematically judged exemplars conceptually related to the conditioned category as having been encoded during the conditioning phase, regardless of their true temporal position. Moreover, individual differences in this temporal misattribution bias predicted recognition memory biases for conditioned stimuli across phases. These findings suggest that emotionally salient experiences distort the temporal precision of surrounding memories, binding adjacent neutral events to the emotional episode. Such distortions may serve an adaptive function by anchoring otherwise forgettable events to a broader conceptual network linked to threat, but at the cost of temporal accuracy.

How Emotion Bends Time in Memory: Behavioral and Neural Evidence from Real-Life Emotional Events

Regina Lapate¹, Jingyi Wang¹, Sydney Fortner¹, Nadezhda Barbashova¹, Mengsi Li¹; ¹Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara

Emotion shapes our memory for time—such as when events occurred or how long they lasted—but precisely how emotion modulates temporal memory remains unclear. Laboratory studies have revealed distortions and enhancements of temporal memory by emotion (Petrucci & Palombo, 2021). Here, we used experience sampling to measure participants’ emotional responses and temporal memory for real-life events. Participants completed daily diaries reporting on the most negative and positive events from each day, while providing valence and arousal ratings and uploading a picture that reminded them of each event. We measured temporal memory for and recovery from those events using weekly surveys over a 9-week period. Negative events were remembered with lower temporal memory accuracy than positive ones. Moreover, positive (vs. negative) events tended to be remembered as having occurred more recently. These effects were largely driven by emotional-event valence—rather than event intensity or arousal. Next, we used fMRI to examine how emotional-event features modulated temporal context coding in the hippocampal–entorhinal (HPC-EC) system in a subset of participants. Replicating and extending prior work (Nielson et al. 2015), larger temporal distance between emotional events predicted lower neural similarity in HPC and EC. Critically, emotional-valence similarity attenuated this relationship in EC, particularly for negative events—suggesting that negative emotion may compress neural representations that track temporal context. These findings underscore that emotion shapes behavioral and neural representations of temporal context for real-life events, providing new insight into how the HPC–EC system integrates affect and time to support episodic memory.