Schedule of Events | Symposia

Age and Valence Shape the Encoding, Retrieval, and Recapitulation of Emotional Memories in the Brain

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

Leonard Faul¹ (leonard.faul@bc.edu), Lauren K. Voso¹, Hannah R. Piccirilli¹, Ryan G. Monkman¹, Brianna D. Lenza¹, Elizabeth A. Kensinger¹; ¹Boston College

A growing body of work has shown that older age is associated with reduced reinstatement of encoding-related neural activity during memory retrieval. To date, no study has examined whether age-related differences in neural activation profiles at both encoding and retrieval differ by emotional valence, despite behavioral evidence of positivity biases in attention and memory among older adults. Here, we analyzed neuroimaging data from a sample of participants across the adult lifespan (19-85 years old) while they incidentally encoded positive, neutral, and negative images. Participants then returned the next day for a recognition memory test, again inside the MRI scanner. At encoding, increased age was associated with reduced activation of occipital and parietal brain regions, particularly for subsequently remembered negative images. At the next-day retrieval test, older adults showed stronger engagement of prefrontal regions than younger adults for remembered, versus forgotten, negative images. Moreover, when compared to neutral memories, reinstated encoding-related activity for positive memories was better preserved with age than for negative memories. This preserved neural recapitulation was primarily located within lateral temporo-occipital regions preferentially responsive to the processing of image content, rather than more general visual or semantic processing, as identified with a functional localizer task. Across participant ages, we also observed that negative and positive memories elicit distinct patterns of recapitulated activity throughout occipital, parietal, and prefrontal regions. Taken together, our findings highlight age-related shifts in how emotional memories are encoded and retrieved, as well as valence biases in the strength of their visuosensory recapitulation.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Development & aging