The scope of this project is to understand how physiological changes induced by emotionally arousing events improve the degree to which affective experiences are stored into long term memory. This research is driven by the hypothesis that the vagus nerve and brainstem neurons that they synapse upon serve as an interface between autonomic arousal, produced by hormone secretion in the periphery, and accompanying changes in neurotransmitter release in the brain that then accelerates memory storage processing. The project will obtain electrophysiological recordings from the vagus nerve to assess how fluctuations in visceral signals regulate the release of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine in brain areas where affective and contextual components of newly learned events are encoded. Other experiments will use behavioral, neurochemical and immunocytochemical endpoints to identify how experiences of an emotional nature increase central noradrenergic transmission. They will also identify how potentiated norepineprhine initiates intracellular signaling cascades that convert novel experiences from labile traces into more permanent long term memory. The overall project is expected to reveal neural and molecular systems that permit arousal-induced changes in peripheral autonomic activity to regulate the strength in which new events are encoded into memory. This project will also provide extensive research training for undergraduate students majoring in Psychology, Cognitive Science and Neuroscience as well as provide an avenue for undergraduates to develop independent thesis projects prior to graduation. These types of opportunities have proven beneficial in not only training the next generation of behavioral neuroscientists, but also in ensuring their entry into productive graduate psychology or neuroscience graduate programs.
