TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ventura-Bort, Carlos
A1  - Wirkner, Janine
A1  - Wendt, Julia
A1  - Hamm, Alfons O.
A1  - Weymar, Mathias
T1  - Establishment of emotional memories is mediated by vagal nerve activation
T2  - The journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience
N2  - Emotional memories are better remembered than neutral ones, but the mechanisms leading to this memory bias are not well under-stood in humans yet. Based on animal research, it is suggested that the memory-enhancing effect of emotion is based on central nor-adrenergic release, which is triggered by afferent vagal nerve activation. To test the causal link between vagus nerve activation and emotional memory in humans, we applied continuous noninvasive transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) during exposure to emotional arousing and neutral scenes and tested subsequent, long-term recognition memory after 1 week. We found that taVNS, compared with sham, increased recollection-based memory performance for emotional, but not neutral, material. These findings were complemented by larger recollection-related brain potentials (parietal ERP Old/New effect) during retrieval of emotional scenes encoded under taVNS, compared with sham. Furthermore, brain potentials recorded during encoding also revealed that taVNS facilitated early attentional discrimination between emotional and neutral scenes. Extending animal research, our behavioral and neu-ral findings confirm a modulatory influence of the vagus nerve in emotional memory formation in humans.
KW  - emotion
KW  - ERPs
KW  - memory
KW  - Old
KW  - New effect
KW  - LPP
KW  - vagus nerve
KW  - tVNS
Y1  - 2021
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/59743
SN  - 1529-2401
VL  - 41
IS  - 36
SP  - 7636
EP  - 7648
PB  - Society for Neuroscience
CY  - Washington, DC
ER  -