Effects of mineralocorticoid receptor stimulation on human cognition

Abstract

Studies on episodic long-term memory have established the notion that the stress-induced increase in glucocorticoids (GCs) has a phase specific effect on memory. GCs enhance memory consolidation while memory retrieval is compromised. The relevance of these findings for the impact of GCs on extinction (and its retrieval) as well as on reconsolidation remains largely unknown. In the present overview I will summarize our recent work addressing these issues. For extinction consolidation, we observed that post-extinction stressmade the extinctionmemory tracemore context-dependent, leading to a stronger renewal effect. For extinction retrieval, the impact of stress depended on the emotionality of the originalmemory trace. In a fear-conditioning paradigm, stress prior to extinction retrieval caused a reduced return of the original fear memory. The opposite result pattern was observed when investigating a neutral predictive learning task. Influencing fear memory reconsolidation appears to be an attractive alternative when trying to eliminate fear memories. While the power of beta blockers to abolish fear memory reconsolidation has been shown convincingly, studies testing the impact of GCs on fear memory reconsolidation in humans were lacking. In a first experiment we could demonstrate that cortisol enhances fear memory reconsolidation as indicated by a stronger return of fear. Together, these studies provide a more elaborate view on the influence of GCs on the modulation of an existing memory trace using extinction or reconsolidation based approaches.