Emotional Memory in Alzheimer’s Disease and Its Atypical Neural Mechanism

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.211220.457How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Emotional memory; Alzheimer’s disease; Abnormal neural mechanism; Neurofeedback intervention

Abstract

Emotions support the formation of durable representations of past experiences in long term memory. It has been suggested that people tend to have a better memory performance for emotional stimuli than neutral stimuli. Based on previous studies, the uncinate fasciculus, linking the amygdala and temporal lobe with the prefrontal lobe, is critical for emotional episodic memory. Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative disease that will interfere with patients’ cognitive function, such as deterioration in memory. However, limited research has prioritised AD patient’s emotional memory performance. In this case, this review aims to better understand the impact of AD on emotional memory from both behavioural and neural mechanism levels. Researchers wondered whether emotional memory deficit would be found in AD patients; whether the memory enhancement effect of emotion is also reduced in AD patients; and weather it could be enhanced intentionally by deep encoding. Additionally, this review summarized the abnormal neural mechanisms. Previous researchers have investigated the damage of white matter connections and grey matter of the limbic system networks associated with AD patients’ emotional memory deficits. Moreover, researchers suggest that, for the emotional stimuli, AD patient’s initial encoding process is different from healthy controls. Last but not least, the investigation has been focused on the effect of neurofeedback whether it could enhance the emotional memory of AD patients as that of healthy subjects. Nevertheless, intactness is required for a successful application of neurofeedback. Thus, such implementations should be applied as early as possible in the course of the disease to ensure optimal results. The future direction should emphasize more causal researches, considering the real social context and tracing and assessing subsequent emotional memory performance after the intervention.

Copyright

© 2021 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.

Open Access

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Letian Zhu
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/12/24
TI  - Emotional Memory in Alzheimer’s Disease and Its Atypical Neural Mechanism
BT  - Proceedings of the 2021 4th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 2645
EP  - 2650
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211220.457
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.211220.457
ID  - Zhu2021
ER  -