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Event segmentation protects emotional memories from competing experiences encoded close in time

Nature Human Behaviour volume 2, pages 291–299 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Fear memories are characterized by their permanence and a fierce resistance to unlearning by new experiences. We considered whether this durability involves a process of memory segmentation that separates competing experiences. To address this question, we used an emotional-learning task designed to measure recognition memory for category exemplars encoded during competing experiences of fear conditioning and extinction. Here, we show that people recognized more fear-conditioned exemplars encoded during conditioning than conceptually related exemplars encoded immediately after a perceptual event boundary that separates conditioning from extinction. Selective episodic memory depended on a period of consolidation, an explicit break between competing experiences, and was unrelated to within-session arousal or the explicit realization of a transition from conditioning to extinction. Collectively, these findings suggest that event boundaries guide selective consolidation to prioritize emotional information in memory—at the expense of related but conflicting information experienced shortly thereafter. We put forward a model whereby event boundaries bifurcate related memory traces for incompatible experiences. This is in contrast to a mechanism that integrates related experiences for adaptive generalization1,2,3, and reveals a potentially distinct organization by which competing memories are adaptively segmented to select and protect nascent fear memories from immediate sources of interference.

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Fig. 1: Emotional learning selectively prioritizes, and extinction diminishes, episodic memories for conceptually related items that are encoded close in time.
Fig. 2: Event boundaries segment memory despite occasional shocks during extinction.
Fig. 3: Selective episodic memory prioritization for threat withstands various optimized extinction protocols.
Fig. 4: A hypothesized mechanism by which perceptual event boundaries automatically segment long-term threat and extinction memories.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Monfils, J. Lewis-Peacock and the LeDoux lab for helpful comments and discussions. The study was supported by NIH R01 MH097085 (to E.A.P.). J.E.D. is supported by NIH K99R00 MH106719. M.C.W.K is supported by an H2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellowship and a Society in Science—Branco Weiss fellowship. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA

    Joseph E. Dunsmoor

  2. Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Medical Centre, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Marijn C. W. Kroes

  3. Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, New York, USA

    Caroline M. Moscatelli, Michael D. Evans & Elizabeth A. Phelps

  4. Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, New York, USA

    Lila Davachi

  5. Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, New York, USA

    Elizabeth A. Phelps

  6. Nathan Kline Institute, Orangeburg, New York, USA

    Elizabeth A. Phelps

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Contributions

J.E.D., M.C.W.K., L.D. and E.A.P. conceived and designed the study. J.E.D., C.M.M. and M.D.E. performed the research. J.E.D. and M.C.W.K. analysed the data. All authors helped to interpret the data. J.E.D., M.C.W.K., L.D. and E.A.P. wrote the manuscript. All authors contributed to and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Joseph E. Dunsmoor.

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Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Results, Supplementary Tables 1–11

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Dunsmoor, J.E., Kroes, M.C.W., Moscatelli, C.M. et al. Event segmentation protects emotional memories from competing experiences encoded close in time. Nat Hum Behav 2, 291–299 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0317-4

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