D. CÎRNECI*^#, GHEORGHE DELIA*, S. CONSTANTINESCU**, MONICA BERCEA***

*Synergon Consulting, 4–10 Muntii Tatra st, 011022 Bucharest, Romania
**“Victor Babes” Center for Diagnostic and Treatment, 281 Mihai Bravu st, 030303 Bucharest, Romania

***Department of Marketing, Economy and Business Administration Faculty, ”Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, 22 Copou Blvd, Iași, Romania

Negative priming tasks evaluate the ability to maintain an active attention on a task while inhibiting other irrelevant information. Although it is traditionally viewed as an attention task, growing evidence has shown that negative priming obeys memory retrieval principles. In this study, 12 healthy male participants (mean age 35) were investigated using fMRI whilst performing a memory retrieval task referring to the content of four short movies. Subsequently, participants completed a spatial negative priming task. We found that performance in a negative priming task positively correlated with performance in the memory retrieval task and also with the BOLD signal in the anterior dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (aMPFC) during the memory retrieval task. In agreement with recent literature, we believe that performance in a spatial negative priming task is a reflection of the brain’s pleomorphism, indicating towards the brain network responsible for the generation of virtual future states by combining pieces of information from episodic memory.

Corresponding author’s e-mail: dragos.cirneci@brainperform.ro

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