Abstract After traumatic events, simple cue-threat associative memories strengthen while episodic memories become incoherent.However, how the brain prioritises cue associations over episodic coding Stainless Steel Spur with 1" Band and 9 Point Rowel of traumatic events remains unclear.Here, we developed an original episodic threat conditioning paradigm in which participants concurrently form two memory representations: cue associations and episodic cue sequence.We discovered that these two distinct memories compete for physiological fear expression, reorganising overnight from an overgeneralised cue-based to a precise sequence-based expression.
With multivariate fMRI, we track inter-area communication of the memory representations to reveal that a rebalancing between hippocampal- and prefrontal control of the fear regulatory circuit governs this memory maturation.Critically, this overnight re-organisation is altered with heightened trait anxiety.Together, we show Scrappers the brain prioritises generalisable associative memories under recent traumatic stress but resorts to selective episodic memories 24 h later.Time-dependent memory competition may provide a unifying account for memory dysfunctions in post-traumatic stress disorders.