Ricerc@Sapienza

Trauma patients treated with ketamine during emergency care present aggravated early post- traumatic stress reaction which is highly predictive of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) development and severity. The use of ketamine in the acute trauma phase may directly or indirectly interfere with neural processes of memory consolidation of the traumatic event, thus leading to the formation of maladaptive memories, a hallmark symptom of PTSD.

Remembering places in which emotional events occur is essential for individual’s survival. However, the mechanisms through which emotions modulate information processing in working memory, especially in the visuo-spatial domain, is little understood and controversial. The present research was aimed at investigating the effect of incidentally learned emotional stimuli on visuo-spatial working memory (VSWM) performance by using a modified version of the object-location task.

The present study examined predictions of the early-phase-elevated-attention hypothesis of the attentional boost effect (ABE), which suggests that transient increases in attention at encoding, as instantiated in the ABE paradigm, should enhance the recognition of neutral and positive items (whose encoding is mostly based on controlled processes), while having small or null effects on the recognition of negative items (whose encoding is primarily based on automatic processes).

The role of emotional landmarks in navigation has been scarcely studied. Previous findings
showed that valence and arousal of landmarks increase landmark’s salience and improve performance
in navigational memory tasks. However, no study has directly explored the interplay between valence
and arousal of emotionally laden landmarks in embodied and not-embodied navigational tasks.
At the aim, 115 college students have been subdivided in five groups according to the landmarks

The investigation of the role of emotional landmarks on human navigation has been
almost totally neglected in psychological research. Therefore, the extent to which
positive and negative emotional landmarks affect topographical memory as compared
to neutral emotional landmark was explored. Positive, negative and neutral affectladen
images were selected as landmarks from the International Affective Picture
System (IAPS) Inventory. The Walking Corsi test (WalCT) was used in order to test the