Schedule of Events | Symposia

Differential Patterns of Neural Activation during Control Operations on Positive vs. Negative Information in Working Memory.

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

Brynn Paulsen¹, Boman Groff¹, Jacob DeRosa^1,2, Jarrod Lewis-Peacock³, Marie T. Banich^1,2; ¹Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado at Boulder, ²Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, ³Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin

Repetitive negative thinking is a core symptom of internalizing disorders, shown to predict and prolong symptoms of psychopathology. Therefore, developing effective strategies to remove negative thoughts is crucial. Past work by our group has shown that each of four working memory (WM) control operations — maintaining an item, replacing it, specifically suppressing it, or clearing the mind of all thought — engage unique neural regions (Banich et al. 2015). The present study examined whether these operations show similar patterns when the information to be manipulated is valenced (negative, positive). We recorded fMRI while participants (N=83) performed these operations on both negative and positive information in WM. Over all operations, regions of the right anterior insula exhibited greater activation for positive than negative items. Regions mainly within the default mode network (left retrosplenial cortex, left parahippocampal region, right hippocampus, left posterior cingulate) exhibited an interaction between operation and valence. Specifically, whenever an item needed to be held in working memory (i.e., maintain, replace), there was greater deactivation for negative stimuli compared to positive stimuli. In contrast, when information needed to be removed from WM (i.e., suppress, clear), there was slightly less deactivation for negative stimuli than for positive stimuli. These findings suggest that control operations in WM influence regional brain activity differently, depending on the valence of the information manipulated. Together, these results provide insight into the neural mechanisms supporting the regulation of emotional information in WM, which may inform targeted interventions to mitigate repetitive negative thinking and its associated psychopathology.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Working memory