TY - JOUR T1 - Pain to remember: a single incidental association with pain leads to increased memory for neutral items one year later JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/035212 SP - 035212 AU - G. Elliott Wimmer AU - Christian Büchel Y1 - 2015/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/12/24/035212.abstract N2 - Negative and positive experiences can exert a strong influence on later memory. Our emotional experiences are composed of many different elements – people, place, things – most of them neutral. Do negative experiences lead to enhanced long-term for these neutral elements as well? Demonstrating a lasting effect of negative experiences on memory is particularly important if memory for emotional events is to adaptively guide behavior days, weeks, or years later. We thus tested whether aversive experiences modulate very long-term memory for single events (episodic memory) in an fMRI experiment. Participants experienced episodes of high or low pain in conjunction with the presentation of incidental, trial-unique neutral object pictures. In a scanned surprise immediate memory test, we found no effect of pain on episodic memory strength. Critically, in a follow-up memory test one year later we found that pain significantly enhanced memory. Neurally, we found no significant predictors of immediate memory. However, for memory one year later, we found that greater insula activity and more unique distributed patterns of insular activity in the initial session correlated with memory for pain-paired objects. These results provide a novel demonstration of neural activity predicting memory one year later. Generally, our results suggest that pairing episodes with arousing negative stimuli may lead to very long-lasting memory enhancements. ER -