Noradrenergic mechanisms of arousal's bidirectional effects on episodic memory.

ABSTRACT: Arousal's selective effects on cognition go beyond the simple enhancement of emotional stimuli, sometimes enhancing and other times impairing processing of proximal neutral information. Past work shows that arousal impairs encoding of subsequent neutral stimuli regardless of their top-down priority via the engagement of β-adrenoreceptors. In contrast, retrograde amnesia induced by emotional arousal can flip to enhancement when preceding neutral items are prioritized in top-down attention. Whether β-adrenoreceptors also contribute to this retrograde memory enhancement of goal-relevant neutral stimuli is unclear. In this pharmacological study, we administered 40mg of propranolol or 40mg of placebo to healthy young adults to examine whether emotional arousal's bidirectional effects on declara

SUBMITTER: Clewett D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5217170 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature