Stress enhances memory for previously encoded events depending on stressor recall.

Stressful events are typically well remembered, but their effects on memory for surrounding neutral events and the underlying mechanisms remain less clear. We hypothesized that stress would enhance memory for events surrounding the stressor, contingent on the memory of the stressor itself. Additionally, we predicted that memory for neutral events would be modulated by pairing them with stressor-related cues.

Cognitive Training Prevents Stress-Induced Working Memory Deficits.

Background: Working memory is a fundamental cognitive process that is critically involved in planning, comprehension, reasoning, and problem solving. Acute stress has been shown to impair working memory. This stress-induced working memory deficit has profound implications for cognitive functioning in everyday life as well as for stress-related mental disorders.

Memory Under Stress: From Adaptation to Disorder.

Stressful events are ubiquitous in everyday life. Exposure to these stressors initiates the temporally orchestrated release of a multitude of hormones, peptides, and neurotransmitters that target brain areas that have been critically implicated in learning and memory. This review summarizes recent insights on the profound impact of stress on 4 fundamental processes of memory: memory formation, memory contextualization, memory retrieval, and memory flexibility.

Post-retrieval stress impairs subsequent memory depending on hippocampal memory trace reinstatement during reactivation.

Upon retrieval, memories can become susceptible to meaningful events, such as stress. Post-retrieval memory changes may be attributed to an alteration of the original memory trace during reactivation-dependent reconsolidation or, alternatively, to the modification of retrieval-related memory traces that impact future remembering. Hence, how post-retrieval memory changes emerge in the human brain is unknown.

Consistently increased dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activity during the exposure to acute stressors.

Stress has a major impact on our mental health. Nonetheless, it is still not fully understood how the human brain responds to ongoing stressful events. Here, we aimed to determine the cortical dynamics during the exposure to ecologically valid, standardized stressors.

Causal role of the angular gyrus in insight-driven memory reconfiguration.

Maintaining an accurate model of the world relies on our ability to update memory representations in light of new information. Previous research on the integration of new information into memory mainly focused on the hippocampus. Here, we hypothesized that the angular gyrus, known to be involved in episodic memory and imagination, plays a pivotal role in the insight-driven reconfiguration of memory representations.

Time-dependent memory transformation in hippocampus and neocortex is semantic in nature.

Memories undergo a time-dependent neural reorganization, which is assumed to be accompanied by a transformation from detailed to more gist-like memory. However, the nature of this transformation and its underlying neural mechanisms are largely unknown. Here, we report that the time-dependent transformation of memory is semantic in nature, while we find no credible evidence for a perceptual transformation.

Strong but Fragmented Memory of a Stressful Episode.

While it is commonly assumed that stressful events are vividly remembered, it remains largely unknown whether all aspects of memory for a stressful episode are enhanced. In this preregistered study, we tested whether stress enhances later remembering of individual elements of a stressful episode at the cost of impaired processing of the association between these elements. Therefore, male and female participants ( = 122) underwent a stressful (or control) episode during which they encoded a series of stimuli.

Higher subjective socioeconomic status is linked to increased charitable giving and mentalizing-related neural value coding.

Socioeconomic status (SES), a concept related to an individual's economic and social position relative to others, can shape social interactions like altruistic behaviors. However, little is known about the exact neurocognitive mechanisms that link SES with altruism. Our study aimed to provide a comprehensive account of the sociocognitive and neural mechanisms through which SES affects charitable giving - an important variant of human altruism.

Multiple routes to enhanced memory for emotionally relevant events.

Events associated with aversive or rewarding outcomes are prioritized in memory. This memory boost is commonly attributed to the elicited affective response, closely linked to noradrenergic and dopaminergic modulation of hippocampal plasticity. Herein we review and compare this 'affect' mechanism to an additional, recently discovered, 'prediction' mechanism whereby memories are strengthened by the extent to which outcomes deviate from expectations, that is, by prediction errors (PEs).

Imagining is not seeing: lower insight-driven memory reconfiguration when imagining the link between separate events.

Gaining insight into the relationship between previously separate events allows us to combine these events into coherent episodes. This insight may occur via observation or imagination. Although much of our reasoning occurs in the absence of direct sensory stimuli, how mnemonic integration is accomplished via imagination has remained completely unknown.

Inferring danger with minimal aversive experience.

Learning about threats is crucial for survival and fundamentally rests upon Pavlovian conditioning. However, Pavlovian threat learning is largely limited to detecting known (or similar) threats and involves first-hand exposure to danger, which inevitably poses a risk of harm. We discuss how individuals leverage a rich repertoire of mnemonic processes that operate largely in safety and significantly expand our ability to recognize danger beyond Pavlovian threat associations.

Neural Index of Reinforcement Learning Predicts Improved Stimulus-Response Retention under High Working Memory Load.

Human learning and decision-making are supported by multiple systems operating in parallel. Recent studies isolating the contributions of reinforcement learning (RL) and working memory (WM) have revealed a trade-off between the two. An interactive WM/RL computational model predicts that although high WM load slows behavioral acquisition, it also induces larger prediction errors in the RL system that enhance robustness and retention of learned behaviors.

Neural correlates of conflict adaptation predict daily stress reactivity.

Chronic exposure to daily stress can be harmful to mental health especially when individuals lack adaptive adjustment mechanisms. The present study aimed to investigate how the adaptive capacities in cognition and emotion as well as their neural signatures could moderate the stress reactivity in daily life. Seventy-five healthy participants aged 18-24 years participated in this study.

Disentangling the roles of dopamine and noradrenaline in the exploration-exploitation tradeoff during human decision-making.

Balancing the exploration of new options and the exploitation of known options is a fundamental challenge in decision-making, yet the mechanisms involved in this balance are not fully understood. Here, we aimed to elucidate the distinct roles of dopamine and noradrenaline in the exploration-exploitation tradeoff during human choice. To this end, we used a double-blind, placebo-controlled design in which participants received either a placebo, 400 mg of the D2/D3 receptor antagonist amisulpride, or 40 mg of the β-adrenergic receptor antagonist propranolol before they completed a virtual patch-foraging task probing exploration and exploitation.

Stress disrupts insight-driven mnemonic reconfiguration in the medial temporal lobe.

Memories are not stored in isolation. Insight into the relationship of initially unrelated events may trigger a flexible reconfiguration of the mnemonic representation of these events. Such representational changes allow the integration of events into coherent episodes and help to build up-to-date-models of the world around us.

Spatio-temporal theta pattern dissimilarity in the right centro-parietal area during memory generalization.

Generalization across past events may guide our action in novel situations. Although generalization is a fundamental memory process, its neural underpinnings are not fully understood yet. In the present experiment, we combinedElectroencephalography(EEG) with multivariate representational similarity analysis (RSA) to examine in particular the role of spatio-temporal patterns of theta oscillations known to be important for associative memory processes, in memory generalization.

Reappraisal enhances memory formation for a stressful episode.

Emotion regulation strategies have been shown to modify the physiological response to stress, yet whether these strategies can modulate also cognitive responses to stress is largely unknown. A prominent cognitive response to stress is the enhanced memory formation for the stressful event, which is an adaptive mechanism to prepare for similar events in the future. Thus, the present study aimed to investigate whether emotion regulation strategies impact the memory formation for a stressful episode.

Stress diminishes outcome but enhances response representations during instrumental learning.

Stress may shift behavioural control from a goal-directed system that encodes action-outcome relationships to a habitual system that learns stimulus-response associations. Although this shift to habits is highly relevant for stress-related psychopathologies, limitations of existing behavioural paradigms hinder research from answering the fundamental question of whether the stress-induced bias to habits is due to reduced outcome processing or enhanced response processing at the time of stimulus presentation, or both. Here, we used EEG-based multivariate pattern analysis to decode neural outcome representations crucial for goal-directed control, as well as response representations during instrumental learning.

Mechanisms of memory under stress.

It is well established that stress has a major impact on memory, driven by the concerted action of various stress mediators on the brain. Recent years, however, have seen considerable advances in our understanding of the cellular, neural network, and cognitive mechanisms through which stress alters memory. These novel insights highlight the intricate interplay of multiple stress mediators, including-beyond corticosteroids, catecholamines, and peptides-for instance, endocannabinoids, which results in time-dependent shifts in large-scale neural networks.

Altruism under Stress: Cortisol Negatively Predicts Charitable Giving and Neural Value Representations Depending on Mentalizing Capacity.

Altruism, defined as costly other-regarding behavior, varies considerably across people and contexts. One prominent context in which people frequently must decide on how to socially act is under stress. How does stress affect altruistic decision-making and through which neurocognitive mechanisms? To address these questions, we assessed neural activity associated with charitable giving under stress.

Sunk costs under stress: Acute stress reduces the impact of past expenses on risky decisions.

Rational choice should be guided solely by the prospects of available options. However, our decisions are often influenced by irrecoverable past costs, even when the current course of action turns out to be unfavorable, reflecting a cognitive bias known as the "sunk-cost effect". In everyday life, many decisions are made under stress or elicit stress themselves.

Determining the effects of training duration on the behavioral expression of habitual control in humans: a multilaboratory investigation.

It has been suggested that there are two distinct and parallel mechanisms for controlling instrumental behavior in mammals: goal-directed actions and habits. To gain an understanding of how these two systems interact to control behavior, it is essential to characterize the mechanisms by which the balance between these systems is influenced by experience. Studies in rodents have shown that the amount of training governs the relative expression of these two systems: Behavior is goal-directed following moderate training, but the more extensively an instrumental action is trained, the more it becomes habitual.

Prediction Errors for Aversive Events Shape Long-Term Memory Formation through a Distinct Neural Mechanism.

Prediction errors (PEs) have been known for decades to guide associative learning, but their role in episodic memory formation has been discovered only recently. To identify the neural mechanisms underlying the impact of aversive PEs on long-term memory formation, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging, while participants saw a series of unique stimuli and estimated the probability that an aversive shock would follow. Our behavioral data showed that negative PEs (i.