ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2018
Locus Coeruleus Activity Strengthens Prioritized Memories Under Arousal.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 82 papers.
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Who cites it
82 citing papers in PubMed, 165 citations in OpenAlex.
- Task-irrelevant stimuli robustly drive phasic pupil-linked arousal but only weakly affect memory formation.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- BOLD fMRI activations and LC contrast associated with successful episodic memory in healthy older adults and MCI.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2026Article
- Error-related memory biases are specific to social stimuli for socially anxious individuals.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- A large-scale heterogeneous 3D magnetic resonance brain imaging dataset for self-supervised learning.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Article
- Electroencephalography, pupillometry, and behavioral evidence for locus coeruleus-noradrenaline system related tonic hyperactivity in older adults.Neurobiology of aging · 2026Article
- Emotional arousal enhances narrative memories through functional integration of large-scale brain networks.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Behavioral state-dependent norepinephrine dynamics in the primary somatosensory and prefrontal cortices during tactile detection tasks.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Inverse Association of Locus Coeruleus MRI Integrity With Structural Volume and Its Impact on Individual's Inattentiveness.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Atomoxetine Drug Properties for Repurposing as a Candidate Alzheimer's Disease Therapeutic Agent.ACS pharmacology & translational science · 2025Review
- Error-Related Memory Biases Are Specific to Social Stimuli for Socially Anxious Individuals.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Arousal increases locus coeruleus blood flow, salience-related brain responses, and modulates negative-valence attentional biases.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Electroencephalography, pupillometry, and behavioral evidence for locus coeruleus-noradrenaline system related tonic hyperactivity in older adults.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Emotional enhancement of memory in Alzheimer's disease dementia: a systematic review.Nature. Mental health · 2025Article
- Age-Related Increase in Locus Ceruleus Activity and Connectivity with the Prefrontal Cortex during Ambiguity Processing.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Near-random connections support top-down feature-based attentional modulations in early sensory cortex.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Introducing the Glutamate-Amplifies-Noradrenergic-Effects (GANE) Model to the Neurocognitive Study of Emotion-Related Impulsivity.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- The interaction between neurotransmitter receptor activity and amyloid-β pathology in Alzheimer's disease.Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD · 2025Review
- Locus coeruleus activation 'resets' hippocampal event representations and separates adjacent memories.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Distortion of overlapping memories relates to arousal and anxiety.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
22 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Recent models posit that bursts of locus ceruleus (LC) activity amplify neural gain such that limited attention and encoding resources focus even more on prioritized mental representations under arousal. Here, we tested this hypothesis in human males and females using fMRI, neuromelanin MRI, and pupil dilation, a biomarker of arousal and LC activity. During scanning, participants performed a monetary incentive encoding task in which threat of punishment motivated them to prioritize encoding of scene images over superimposed objects. Threat of punishment elicited arousal and selectively enhanced memory for goal-relevant scenes. Furthermore, trial-level pupil dilations predicted better scene memory under threat, but were not related to object memory outcomes. fMRI analyses revealed that greater threat-evoked pupil dilations were positively associated with greater scene encoding activity in LC and parahippocampal cortex, a region specialized to process scene information. Across participants, this pattern of LC engagement for goal-relevant encoding was correlated with neuromelanin signal intensity, providing the first evidence that LC structure relates to its activation pattern during cognitive processing. Threat also reduced dynamic functional connectivity between high-priority (parahippocampal place area) and lower-priority (lateral occipital cortex) category-selective visual cortex in ways that predicted increased memory selectivity. Together, these findings support the idea that, under arousal, LC activity selectively strengthens prioritized memory representations by modulating local and functional network-level patterns of information processing.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.