Acute stress can hinder the ability to connect memories of past events with new information, according to a recent study. This finding may clarify why people struggle to exhibit insight under pressure.
Published today in Science Advances, the research combined brain imaging with psychological assessments to investigate how stress affects the ability to retrieve previous experiences and draw conclusions.
The integration of behavioral testing with neural imaging is particularly striking, noted Brice Kuhl, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon who wasn’t involved in the research.
Only connect
The brain’s capacity to link new and old information for inference relies on a cognitive process known as integration. For instance, recalling that a friend wore a bright green jacket and then seeing a similar jacket on a bench might lead you to infer that your friend is nearby. This integration process can be disrupted in individuals with certain mental health issues, including anxiety disorders and psychosis.
The hippocampus plays a crucial role in this integration. Given its particular susceptibility to stress, Lars Schwabe and colleagues from the University of Hamburg aimed to explore how acute stress impacts information integration and inference.
Memory task
On the first day of the experiment, 121 participants were tasked with memorizing pairs of images, each featuring an animal alongside either a face or a scene.
On the following day, about half faced a mock job interview where they defended their suitability for a hypothetical position while tackling complex mental math. Meanwhile, the control group was asked to give a speech on any chosen topic and complete a simpler math task.
Afterward, participants were shown a new series of image pairs, each combining an animal with a 3D shape.
Next, they viewed individual 3D shapes along with a collection of faces and scenes. Their task was to select the face or scene they believed would most likely be linked to each 3D shape.
As a hypothetical example, a participant might have memorized a pair consisting of a cat and a forest scene on the first day and a cat with a blue cube on the second. If their brain effectively integrated the memories, they would connect the blue cube to the forest scene.
