ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2021
Establishment of Emotional Memories Is Mediated by Vagal Nerve Activation: Evidence from Noninvasive taVNS.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 50 citations in OpenAlex.
- Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation may improve cognitive deficits in neuropsychiatric diseases-a systematic review.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2026Pooled it
- Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation enhanced working memory in older adults with age-related hearing loss.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Non-invasive transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation during memory retrieval enhances recollection of emotionally salient memories.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Effect of transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation on the improvement of cognitive function in older patients with schizophrenia: A randomised controlled study.General psychiatry · 2026Article
- No Effect of Continuous Transcutaneous Auricular Vagus Nerve Stimulation on the P3, the P600, or Physiological Markers of Noradrenergic Activity in an Oddball and Sentence Comprehension Task.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Article
- Transcutaneous Auricular Vagus Nerve Stimulation for Treating Emotional Dysregulation and Inflammation in Common Neuropsychiatric Disorders.Brain sciences · 2025Review
- Article
- Ready for translation: non-invasive auricular vagus nerve stimulation inhibits psychophysiological indices of stimulus-specific fear and facilitates responding to repeated exposure in phobic individuals.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Transcutaneous Auricular Vagus Nerve Stimulation Enhances Emotional Processing and Long-Term Recognition Memory: Electrophysiological Evidence Across Two Studies.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- A pooled analysis of the side effects of non-invasive Transcutaneous Auricular Vagus Nerve Stimulation (taVNS).Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Stimulate to Remember? The Effects of Short Burst of Transcutaneous Vagus Nerve Stimulation (taVNS) on Memory Performance and Pupil Dilation.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- A vagal route to memory: evidence from invasive and non-invasive electrical vagus nerve stimulation studies and areas for future clinical application.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Review
- Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation in healthy individuals, stroke, and Parkinson's disease: a narrative review of safety, parameters, and efficacy.Frontiers in physiology · 2025Review
- Article
- Opposing effects of pre-encoding stress on neural substrates of item and emotional contextual source memory retrieval.Neurobiology of stress · 2024Article
- Feasibility and effectiveness of transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) in awake mice.CNS neuroscience & therapeutics · 2024Article
- Effects of Transcutaneous Auricular Vagus Nerve Stimulation on the P300: Do Stimulation Duration and Stimulation Type Matter?Brain sciences · 2024Article
- Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation modulates the processing of interoceptive prediction error signals and their role in allostatic regulation.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Advances in VNS efficiency and mechanisms of action on cognitive functions.Frontiers in physiology · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Emotional memories are better remembered than neutral ones, but the mechanisms leading to this memory bias are not well understood in humans yet. Based on animal research, it is suggested that the memory-enhancing effect of emotion is based on central noradrenergic 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 neural findings confirm a modulatory influence of the vagus nerve in emotional memory formation in humans.
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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.