Neuromagnetic Activity During Recognition of Emoti

Authors: Johanna Kissler Anne Hauswald

Publish Date: 2008/03/12

Volume: 20, Issue: 4, Pages: 192-204

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Abstract

Recently studied ‹old’ stimuli lead to larger frontal and parietal ERP responses than ‹new’ stimuli The present experiment investigated the neuromagnetic correlates MEG of this ‹oldnew’ effect and its modulation by emotional stimulus content Highly arousing pleasant highly arousing unpleasant and unarousing neutral photographs were presented to the participants with the instruction to memorize them They were later represented together with new photographs in an oldnew decision task In line with previous ERP studies a longlasting oldnew effect 350–700 ms was found Independently an emotion effect also occurred as reflected in a particularly left temporal activity increase for emotional pictures between 450 and 580 ms Moreover only for the pleasant pictures did the early part of the oldnew effect which is thought to reflect familiarity based recognition processes interact with picture content The oldnew effect for pleasant pictures in frontal regions was larger than the one for neutral or unpleasant pictures between 350 and 450 ms In parallel subjects’ responses were accelerated towards and biased in favour of classifying pleasant pictures as old However when false alarm rate was taken into account there was no significant effect of emotional content on recognition accuracy In sum this MEG study demonstrates an effect of particularly pleasant emotional content on recognition memory which may be mediated by a familiarity based process

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