Acute stress throughout the memory cycle: Diverging effects on associative and item memory.

ABSTRACT: Acute stress can modulate memory for individual parts of an event (items), but whether it similarly influences memory for associations between items remains unclear. We used a within-subjects design to explore the influence of acute stress on item and associative memory in humans. Participants associated negative words with neutral objects, rated their subjective arousal for each pair, and completed delayed item and paired associative recognition tasks. We found strikingly different patterns of acute stress effects on item and associative memory: for high-arousal pairs, preencoding stress enhanced associative memory, whereas postencoding stress enhanced item memory. Preretrieval stress consistently impaired both forms of memory. We found that the influence of stress-induced cortisol also v

SUBMITTER: Goldfarb EV 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6312485 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature