Schedule of Events | Symposia

Individual Differences in Sleep Quality Shape the Strength of Vividness-Related Neural Signaling During Emotional Memory Retrieval

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Lauren K. Voso¹ (vosol@bc.edu), Leonard Faul¹, Hannah R. Piccirilli¹, Elizabeth A. Kensinger¹; ¹Boston College

Vividness is a crucial aspect of how we remember the past, but it is unclear how vividness is represented in the brain for different valanced emotions. Additionally, while some work indicates that sleep enhances visuosensory activation for vivid memories, others have found that sleep is associated with diminished physiological reactivity to remembered emotional content (sleep-to-forget, sleep-to-remember hypothesis; SFSR) (van der Helm & Walker, 2011). To examine these relationships, we analyzed fMRI data from a sample of young-to-middle aged adults (19-49 years old). Participants encoded negative, neutral, and positive images, each preceded by a degraded line-drawing version. The next day, participants provided a comprehensive evaluation of the prior night’s sleep quality before an fMRI retrieval task, with line-drawings seen at encoding intermixed with new line-drawings. If remembered as old, participants rated the subjective vividness of their mental reconstruction of the full image. We analyzed whether neural activation during recognition was parametrically modulated by subsequent vividness ratings. Individual differences in sleep quality were also included in group-level analyses. Findings show the initial recognition of line drawings was associated with robust activation distributed throughout primary and secondary visuosensory regions whereas modulation by vividness was evident in default network regions including the precuneus, medial PFC, and angular gyrus, as well as the cerebellum. Better sleep quality was associated with reduced vividness-related activation in the cerebellum for negative memories. These results align with the SFSR hypothesis in suggesting that sleep can diminish the emotional reactivity to highly vivid negative memories.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions