Social-Emotional and Neurophysiological Measures Additively and Interactively Predict Adolescents' Long-Term Memory in a Longitudinal Study

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 26
  In Roundtable Session: Brain, Neurosciences, and Education SIG Roundtable

Abstract

Social-emotional engagement supports adolescents’ memory for social information. Remembering information is also indexed by physiological measures like striatal dopamine, related to arousal and attention, and activity in the brain’s default mode network (DMN), a central neural connectivity hub. We conducted a longitudinal interview and fMRI study of 56 low-SES adolescents’ reactions to emotionally evocative, true-story videos. We found that adolescents’ description of their emotional feelings, eye blink rate (a proxy for striatal dopamine), and subsequent DMN activity, independently, additively and interactively predicted memory for stories five years later. Effects held for both overall memory and on a story-by-story basis. Considering adolescents’ social-emotional meaning-making and neurophysiological measures together may lead to a more holistic understanding of how adolescents build social memories.

Authors

• Rebecca JM Gotlieb, University of California - Los Angeles

• Xiao-Fei Yang, University of Southern California

• Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, University of Southern California