Shared regulatory systems in memory suppression and fear extinction: An ALE and MACM meta-analysis

Memory suppression and fear extinction both reduce the influence of past experiences on current cognition and behavior, but they are typically studied within separate research traditions. The present study examined whether these two processes recruit partially overlapping neural systems involved in the regulation of unwanted memories and previously threat-associated cues. We conducted a preregistered coordinate-based meta-analysis of fMRI studies using activation likelihood estimation (ALE) and meta-analytic connectivity modeling (MACM). The analysis included 63 experiments involving 1,452 participants and focused on contrasts commonly used to index retrieval suppression in the Think/No-Think paradigm and threat-cue processing during extinction learning. ALE revealed convergent activation in bilateral inferior frontal gyrus/anterior insula and right inferior parietal lobule. MACM further showed that these regions were embedded within broader executive-control and attention-related coactivation networks. These findings suggest that memory suppression and fear extinction partially converge within broader control- and attention-related systems involved in controlling task-relevant memory and threat representations. At the same time, partly distinct medial temporal and affective-learning patterns point to important domain-specific differences between intentional episodic retrieval suppression and extinction-based threat-safety updating. Overall, the findings help bridge research on memory control and fear extinction by identifying partially overlapping regulatory systems while preserving important theoretical distinctions between the two processes. This framework highlights how control- and attention-related neural systems may contribute to the regulation of unwanted memories and conditioned fear responses through their interactions with memory, threat-learning, and contextual updating processes.