Schedule of Events | Symposia

Maintenance suppression reduces access to fear-conditioned information in working memory

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Caleb N. Jerinic-Brodeur¹ (cjerinic@utexas.edu), Joseph E. Dunsmoor¹, Jarrod A. Lewis-Peacock¹; ¹University of Texas at Austin

Prior work has shown that suppressing the maintenance of intrinsically emotional content in working memory can impair access to that information in immediate memory tests, regardless of valence. However, it remains unclear how acquired emotion influences cognitive control processes that target information in working memory. In everyday life, neutral information often gains emotional significance through learning and experience. We hypothesized that information in working memory that is associated with threat may be more resistant to suppression due to its heightened salience. Participants completed a multi-phase experiment using three semantic categories of intrinsically neutral images. Images from one category were pre-exposed before fear learning to ensure they remained neutral. Participants then underwent Pavlovian fear conditioning, where images from one category were paired with mild electric shocks (CS+) and images from another category were never paired with shocks (CS-). Finally, participants completed a working memory removal task using trial-unique images from the three categories. Participants encoded a single image (CS+, CS-, Neutral), were cued to either suppress, maintain or do nothing further to that image, and then responded to a memory probe after a brief delay. Our results demonstrate that participants were faster to endorse an item that had been cued for maintenance, and slower to endorse an item that had been suppressed, regardless of its learned emotional value. This suggests that maintenance suppression is successful in reducing the accessibility of fear-conditioned information, and therefore could be an effective tool to control aversive memories that occupy the focus of attention.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Working memory