Abstract
Introduction The experience of stressful events can alter brain structures involved in memory encoding, storage and retrieval. Here we review experimental research assessing the impact of the stress-related hormone cortisol on long-term memory retrieval.Method A comprehensive literature search was conducted on PubMed, Web of Science and PsycNet databases with the following terms: “stress,” “long-term memory,” and “retrieval.” Studies were included in the review if they tested samples of healthy human participants, with at least one control group, and with the onset of the stress intervention occurring after the encoding phase and shortly (up to one hour) before the final memory test.Results Thirteen studies were included in the qualitative synthesis (N = 962) and were classified according to the time elapsed between stress induction and memory retrieval (stress-retrieval delay), the stress-inducing protocol (stressor), the time of day in which stress induction took place, sex, and age of participants. Most studies induced stress with the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) between 15 and 25 minutes before the final memory (mostly recall) test and showed significant increases in cortisol levels and memory impairment.Discussion The reviewed studies indicate that stress does impair retrieval, particularly when induced with the TSST, in the afternoon, up to 45 minutes before the onset of the final memory test, in healthy young men. These results may inform future research on the impact of stress-induced cortisol surges on memory retrieval.
Highlights
The experience of stressful events can alter brain structures involved in memory encoding, storage and retrieval
The first assessment was to check whether stress induction occurred before the final memory test
Five studies were excluded because stress onset occurred at a different moment of the experiment, and two studies were excluded because they tested cognitive functions other than long-term memory
Summary
Stressful events are common in everyone’s life, inducing physiological changes, such as increased heart rate and sweating.[1] Stressful events can impact memory and reasoning Due to their relevance, stress and its main hormone, cortisol, are widely investigated.[2,3,4,5,6,7] Here we review studies on the effects of stress on memory retrieval, highlighting inconsistencies found in the literature and presenting suggestions for future studies. In addition to timing and stressor, we classified studies according to the time of day in which the retrieval session took place (morning vs afternoon), sex, and age of participants These factors were deemed important because they are known to affect cortisol response and because previous studies reported conflicting results. Stress-related memory impairment seems to be sexand gender-specific, having been observed mostly in young male participants[16]: older participants are less affected, likely due to their lower responsiveness to circulating cortisol levels,[24] and women are less affected depending on the phase of their menstrual cycle.[18,25] We classified the search results along these factors (e.g., sex, age) in order to further explore their moderating influence on stress-related memory deficits
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