Positive modulation of a neutral declarative memory by a threatening social event

RODRIGO FERNANDEZ; LUZ BAVASSI; JORGE CAMPOS; RICARDO ALLEGRI; VICTOR MOLINA; CECILIA FORCATO; MARIA EUGENIA PEDREIRA

NEUROBIOLOGY OF LEARNING AND MEMORY

ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2015

1074-7427

Memories can be altered by negative or arousing experiences due to the activation of the stressresponsive sympatho-adrenal-medullary axis (SYM). Here, we used a neutral declarative memory that was acquired during multi-trial training to determine the effect of a threatening event on memory withoutemotional valence. To this end, participants received a new threatening social protocol before learning pairs of meaningless syllables and were tested either 15 min, 2 days or 8 days after acquisition. We first demonstrated that this threatening social situation activates not only the SYM axis (Experiment 1) and the hypothalamus?pituitary?adrenal axis (HPA; Experiment 2), but also, it improves the acquisition or early consolidation of the syllable pairs (Experiment 3). This improvement is not a transient effect; it can be observed after the memory is consolidated. Furthermore, this modulation increases the persistence of memory (Experiment 4). Thus, it is possible to affect memories with specific events that contain unrelated content and a different valence.