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Abstract Research in affective science includes over one hundred thousand articles, the vast majority of which have been published in only the past two decades. The size and rapid growth of this field have led to unique challenges for the twenty-first-century scientist including how to develop both breadth and depth of scholarship, curb siloing and promote integrative and interdisciplinary framework, and represent and monitor the field in its entirety. Here, we help address these issues by compactly mapping out this enormous field using citation network analysis (CNA). We generated a citation matrix of over 100,000 publications and over 1 million citations since the seminal works on emotion by Charles Darwin (1872) and William James (1884). Using graph theory metric and content analysis of titles and abstracts, we identified and characterized the contents of 69 research communities, their most influential articles, and their interconnectedness with each other. We further identified potential “missed connections” between communities that share similar content but do not have strong citation-based connections. In doing so, we establish the first, low-dimensional representation, or field-wide map, of a substantial portion of the affective sciences literature. This panoramic view of the field provides affective and non-affective scientists alike with the means to rapidly survey dozens of major research communities and topics in the field, guide scholarship development, and identify gaps and connections for developing an integrative science. 

Abstract Individuals differ greatly in their ability to remember the details of past events, yet little is known about the brain processes that explain such individual differences in a healthy young population. Previous research suggests that episodic memory relies on functional communication among ventral regions of the default mode network (“DMN-C”) that are strongly interconnected with the medial temporal lobes. In this study, we investigated whether the intrinsic functional connectivity of the DMN-C subnetwork is related to individual differences in memory ability, examining this relationship across 243 individuals (ages 18-50 years) from the openly available Cambridge Center for Aging and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) dataset. We first estimated each participant’s whole-brain intrinsic functional brain connectivity by combining data from resting-state, movie-watching, and sensorimotor task scans to increase statistical power. We then examined whether intrinsic functional connectivity predicted performance on a narrative recall task. We found no evidence that functional connectivity of the DMN-C, with itself, with other related DMN subnetworks, or with the rest of the brain, was related to narrative recall. Exploratory connectome-based predictive modeling (CBPM) analyses of the entire connectome revealed a whole-brain multivariate pattern that predicted performance, although these changes were largely outside of known memory networks. These results add to emerging evidence suggesting that individual differences in memory cannot be easily explained by brain differences in areas typically associated with episodic memory function. 

The way humans remember events changes across the lifespan. Older adults often rate the vividness of their memories as being greater or equal to younger adults, despite poorer performance on episodic memory tasks. This study explored how the content (place, person and object) and specificity (conceptual gist versus perceptual detail) of event memories relate to the subjective experience of memory vividness and memory confidence, and how this relationship is affected by healthy ageing. 100 healthy older adults and 100 young adults were tested online, using an adapted version of a paradigm developed by Cooper and Ritchey (2022). At encoding, participants generated a distinctive story to associate together (1) a theme word, and images of (2) a famous person, (3) a place, and (4) an object, to create unique events. At test, participants identified the event components using word labels (indexing conceptual gist), and the studied images (indexing perceptual details). Replicating Cooper and Ritchey (2022), we found that young adults’ memory vividness ratings were related to their memory for the conceptual gist of the events, with no modulation by the type of the content recalled. Strikingly, older adults showed the same relationship between vividness measures and objective performance as the young adults. Contrary to some previous studies, we found that older adults obtained lower scores for gist-based memory, and their vividness ratings were correspondingly lower than the younger adults. Across both age groups, vividness and confidence ratings followed a similar pattern, showing a stronger relationship with conceptual gist. Our results suggest that throughout the lifespan, the amount of conceptual information retrieved about an event relates to the ability to reexperience it vividly, and to have confidence in one’s memory. 

Abstract The brain is composed of networks of interacting brain regions that support higher-order cognition. Among these, a core network of regions has been associated with recollection and other forms of episodic construction. Past research has focused largely on the roles of individual brain regions in recollection or on their mutual engagement as part of an integrated network. However, the relationship between these region- and network-level contributions remains poorly understood. Here, we applied multilevel structural equation modeling to examine the functional organization of the posterior medial (PM) network and its relationship to episodic memory outcomes. We evaluated two aspects of functional heterogeneity in the PM network: first, the organization of individual regions into subnetworks, and second, the presence of regionally specific contributions while accounting for network-level effects. Our results suggest that the PM network is composed of ventral and dorsal subnetworks, with the ventral subnetwork making a unique contribution to recollection, especially to recollection of spatial information, and that memory-related activity in individual regions is well accounted for by these network-level effects. These findings highlight the importance of considering the functions of individual brain regions within the context of their affiliated networks.