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Neural Circuitry Underlying The Intrusion Of Task-Irrelevant Threat Into Working Memory In Anxiety, Daniel Stout Aug 2016

Neural Circuitry Underlying The Intrusion Of Task-Irrelevant Threat Into Working Memory In Anxiety, Daniel Stout

Theses and Dissertations

Dispositional anxiety is an important risk factor for the development of anxiety and other psychological disorders. Symptoms commonly expressed by highly anxious individuals include intrusive memories, uncertainty, and worry — all occurring in the absence of immediate threat. This raises the possibility that anxious individuals have difficulty governing threat’s access to working memory, the mental workspace where goal-related information is actively retained for guiding on-going behavior. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while 81 subjects completed a well-validated working memory task, I show that threat-related and neutral distracters unnecessarily gain access to working memory, as evidenced by increased neural activity …


An Evaluation Of The Influences Of Extra-Hippocampal Processes On Pattern Separation, Malia L. Anderson Apr 2016

An Evaluation Of The Influences Of Extra-Hippocampal Processes On Pattern Separation, Malia L. Anderson

Theses and Dissertations

Long-term declarative memory depends on pattern separation, which reduces the degree of overlap between similar representations, to maintain memory specificity, and on pattern completion, which occurs when a degraded cue is used to retrieve a previously stored memory. Previous studies aimed at evaluating the underlying neuronal substrates of these computational processes have used a mnemonic discrimination paradigm and fMRI to focus on the hippocampus, to the exclusion of cortical processing. We aim to investigate the influences extra-hippocampal processes have on pattern separation in the following two studies. Study 1. Computational models of pattern completion suggest it occurs cortically and results …