Emotional arousal and enhanced amygdala activity: New evidence for the old perseveration-consolidation hypothesis
- Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, and Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, University of California, Irvine, California 92697-3800, USA
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Just a little over a century has passed since Müller and Pilzecker (1900) proposed the “perseveration-consolidation” hypothesis suggesting that neural activity initiated by newly learned information perseverates for a while and that such perseveration is critical for consolidating memory. Although memory consolidation is currently the focus of considerable research investigating the molecular mechanisms responsible for converting new memories into lasting memories and the brain regions essential for such conversion, “perseveration” has been dropped from the hyphenated hypothesis and has not remained an explicit focus of research and theory concerning memory consolidation (McGaugh 1999, 2000).
The essential experimental evidence supporting the memory consolidation hypothesis is that the memory-influencing effectiveness (i.e., impairment or enhancement) of treatments administered after training decreases as the training–treatment interval is increased. Such findings do not require an assumption that the treatments act by altering perseverating neural activity, as many kinds of neural alterations might be …
