The role of the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism in individual differences in long-term memory capacity

Montag, Christian; Felten, Andrea; Markett, Sebastian; Fischer, Luise; Winkel, Katja; Cooper, Andrew and Reuter, Martin. 2014. The role of the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism in individual differences in long-term memory capacity. Journal of Molecular Neuroscience, 54(4), pp. 796-802. ISSN 0895-8696 [Article]

No full text available

Abstract or Description

The protein brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) plays an important role in diverse memory processes and is strongly expressed in the hippocampus. The hippocampus itself is a key structure involved in the processing of information from short-term to long-term memory. Due to the putative role of BDNF in memory consolidation, a prominent single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) on the BDNF gene (BDNF Val66Met) was investigated in the context of long-term memory performance. N = 138 students were presented with 40 words from 10 categories, each consisting of eight words such as ‘fruits’ or ‘vehicles’ in a memory recognition task (specifically the Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm). Recognition performance was analyzed 25 min after the initial presentation of the word list and subsequently 1 week after the initial presentation. Overall, individual long-term memory performance immediately after learning the word list (T1) and performance 1 week later (T2) did not differ on the basis of the BDNF SNP, but an interaction effect of BDNF Val66Met by time-of-recall was found: Carriers of the Met66+ variant showed the strongest decline in hit rate performance over time.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12031-014-0417-1

Keywords:

BDNF Val66Met Long-term memory Cognition Individual differences

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Psychology

Dates:

DateEvent
December 2014Published

Item ID:

10711

Date Deposited:

30 Sep 2014 08:22

Last Modified:

30 Jun 2017 14:16

Peer Reviewed:

Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.

URI:

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/10711

Edit Record Edit Record (login required)