Mara Mather from the University of Southern California visited CDS this week and gave a talk in the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research colloquium on “How emotion increases the gain on mental activity”. See the abstract below:

How do the physiological processes triggered by arousal select what we notice and remember? Decades of laboratory research have failed to adequately answer this question. Some studies have suggested that the norepinephrine released during intense emotions target parts of the brain responsible for laying down new memories, thus enhancing later recollection of emotionally charged events. But this does not explain how emotion sometimes enhances memories for neutral events or information. Even more puzzling, across studies we see that memory for the very same stimuli is sometimes strengthened and sometimes impaired by emotional arousal. In this talk, I present evidence that emotional arousal makes attention and memory more selective by favoring strong and inhibiting weak representations. I argue that this increase in gain under arousal occurs as a result of norepinephrine interacting with glutamate at local ‘hot spots’ of high activity to selectively enhance processing high priority representations.