Alexandra O. Cohen

Learning good and bad associations and updating them amidst change facilitates adaptive behavior. Differences in sensitivity to salient, dynamic information from the environment may influence how learning unfolds. Cross-species research suggests that adolescents, relative to younger and older individuals, may exhibit more persistent learned negative and positive associations. However, direct within-person comparisons of valenced learning processes are scarce, and the mechanisms underlying developmental differences in the persistence of learned associations remain unclear. In adults, the persistence of negative associations has been linked to individual differences in how people use experience to infer the structure of their environment. Developmental changes in these same latent-structure inference processes may underpin greater persistence of valenced associations during adolescence. To test this, participants ages 10-25 years completed a Pavlovian learning task in which distinct cues predicted gain, loss, or neither, followed by extinction, during which outcomes ceased. Conditioned responses to both positive and negative associations peaked and took longer to extinguish in late adolescence, near age 19. Negative associations were similarly robustly learned in young adults and weakly persisted in a new extinction context in early adolescence. While a shared latent-structure inference process was observed across valences, age-related differences in the tendency to attribute changes in reinforcement contingencies to multiple latent states mirrored the persistence of valenced associations in adolescence. These findings suggest that while both positive and negative outcomes shape dynamic learning across age, valenced learned associations more strongly influence behavior and cognition during adolescence, as individuals learn to independently navigate a changing world.

Adolescents gain independence and encounter new environments with various sources of uncertainty to learn from as dynamic cognitive and neural development unfolds. Recent behavioral and computational modeling evidence demonstrates that both external and internal sources of uncertainty influence learning processes during adolescence. Findings suggest that adolescents, relative to younger and older individuals, may be uniquely poised to detect and adapt to uncertainty in learning. Adaptations to uncertainty during adolescence may have consequences for cognitive functions and mental health.

Emotional memories persist within individuals and over generations. Past research has examined functions of parent-child memory sharing, but little work has assessed how the emotional qualities of memories are transmitted from parent to child and whether emotion transmission relates to memory content transmission. An understanding of how emotional memories are transmitted may be particularly important during adolescence, a developmental period marked by heightened sensitivity to emotional information, increasing independence from caregivers, and the emergence of mental health symptoms. The current study investigated the intergenerational transmission of parents’ autobiographical emotional memories to their teen offspring in healthy dyads using behavioral measures and natural language processing tools. We found that emotional valence and arousal linked to parents’ memories are transmitted from parent to teen. Greater parent-teen agreement in valence ratings was associated with greater parent-teen overlap in both subjective vividness ratings and objective memory content of individual memories. Subjective memory transmission was modestly related to lower mental health symptoms in teens after accounting for parent symptoms. These findings demonstrate that parents’ emotional memories are transmitted to their teens and provide preliminary evidence that autobiographical emotional memory transmission from parents could be a protective factor for mental health in adolescence.

Everyday experiences can evoke positive feelings that differ among individuals and guide their behavior. Although reward processing is often linked to positive feelings, the mechanisms underlying subjective positive affect and whether they are shared for varied positive experiences is unclear. Here, we used fMRI and predictive modeling to investigate how dynamic, personalized positive experiences are encoded in the brain in humans of both sexes. Neural representations and functional integration during experiences of monetary reward, social media, music, and positive autobiographical memories were used to predict participants' affect ratings of each experience. Across experiences, positive affect was encoded in multivariate neural patterns and functional coupling of distributed cortical and subcortical brain areas, including some value-linked brain regions, like the orbitofrontal cortex. Restricted sets of brain representations and functional connections linked to sensory processing were involved in encoding stimulus-specific positive affect. Our findings suggest that positive affect may be computed and communicated throughout the brain.

Rewards signal information in the environment that is valuable and thus useful to remember. Rewards benefit memory across development, but how reward-associated memories are represented in the brain has not been well characterized. Here we conducted pattern similarity analyses of fMRI data in participants aged 8-25 to elucidate how neural representations in key memory-related brain areas are influenced by reward, and how these relationships change across childhood and adolescence. We found that reward information was reflected in pattern similarity during encoding in ventral temporal cortex and in changes in similarity from encoding to retrieval in anterior hippocampus (aHC). Strikingly, aHC reward-sensitive representations also varied with age such that adults’ memory benefitted from stability of hippocampal representations, whereas younger participants’ memory improvements were associated with greater drift in representations over time. Moreover, across all participants, reward-related univariate activation in the ventral tegmental area was associated with a greater tendency toward representational drift in aHC. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that reward modulates neural memory representations, and that the representational patterns supporting reward-motivated memory shift with age.

Rewards signal information in the environment that is valuable and thus useful to remember. Rewards benefit memory across development, but how reward-associated memories are represented in the brain has not been well characterized. Here we conducted pattern similarity analyses of fMRI data in male and female participants aged 8–25 to elucidate how neural representations in key memory-related brain areas are influenced by reward and how these relationships change across childhood and adolescence. We found that reward information was reflected in pattern similarity during encoding in the ventral temporal cortex and in changes in similarity from encoding to retrieval in anterior hippocampus (aHC). Strikingly, aHC reward-sensitive representations also varied with age such that adults’ memory benefitted from stability of hippocampal representations, whereas younger participants’ memory improvements were associated with greater drift in representations over time. Moreover, across all participants, reward-related univariate activation in the ventral tegmental area was associated with a greater tendency toward representational drift in aHC. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that reward modulates neural memory representations and that the representational patterns supporting reward-motivated memory shift with age.

Everyday experiences can evoke positive feelings that differ among individuals and guide their behavior. Although reward processing is often linked to positive feelings, few studies have assessed the mechanisms underlying subjective positive affect. Whether varied positive experiences share brain mechanisms that are predictive of subjective positive affect is unclear. Here, we used fMRI and predictive modeling to investigate how multiple dynamic, personalized positive experiences are encoded in the brain. Neural representations and functional integration of brain areas during experiences of monetary reward, social media, music, and positive autobiographical memories were used to predict participants' affect ratings of each experience. We found that, across experiences, positive affect was encoded in multivariate neural patterns and functional coupling of distributed cortical and subcortical brain areas, as well as some canonical value-linked brain regions, like the orbitofrontal cortex. We also found that more restricted sets of brain representations and functional connections linked to sensory processing were involved in encoding type-specific subjective positive affect. Our findings suggest that positive affect may be computed and communicated throughout the brain.

Enhanced memory for salient events can be driven by affective responses and by surprising outcomes. Recent work has suggested that deviations in expected feelings can influence decision making alongside a traditional learning signal, the reward prediction error. Whether a dynamic measure of “affective surprise” may serve as a learning signal that modulates the formation of lasting memories remains unclear. This study investigated how affective surprise elicited by dynamic changes in affective states influences long-term episodic memory. We introduce a novel computation for affective surprise informed by literature on prediction error-driven learning and derived from individual participants’ continuous affect ratings of valence and arousal. We first reanalyzed a published dataset and then conducted an independent replication study in which participants encoded item sequences while listening to emotional music. Participants then re-listened to the music while providing continuous ratings of their felt emotions. We assessed how affective surprise influenced different aspects of episodic memory after 24 hours. We found that greater affective surprise at a given moment, or larger deviations from the recent history of ratings, enhanced memory for when an item occurred in a sequence. In contrast, we found inconsistent effects of affective surprise on item recognition memory across the two studies. Together, these findings suggest that affective surprise, regardless of direction, enhances the binding of items to their temporal contexts in memory. This work demonstrates that affective surprise, in particular valence-related surprise, might act as a learning signal with consequences for episodic memory.

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is heterogenous, and criteria can be met through several expressions of harmful use (Watts et al., 2021) ranging from frequent binge drinking episodes and low-grade excessive consumption (e.g., 2 drinks every evening), to everyday use associated with neurobiological changes seen in active addiction. Precise understanding of use patterns and the cognitive and emotional experiences that drive these patterns are key in both a research context, where neurobiological, genetic, and personality factors may differ amongst use patterns (e.g., Delawalla et al., 2023) and in a clinical intervention context, where intervention for one use pattern may look very different from another (Nadkarni et al., 2022). We derived a four-factor model of compulsive alcohol use (CAU) in a representative sample of N = 2,004 Americans. The CAU model suggests the construct is comprised of Intrusive Thoughts, Emotionality, Craving, and Loss of Control. Further, we validated the emergent models against collateral measures to verify the structure and predictive value.