Stress impairs your brain's ability to link memories - dampening insight

Acute stress makes it harder to connect memories of past events with fresh information. Brain imaging and psychological testing show that stress interferes with integration, a cognitive process that combines new input with stored experience to support inferences. The hippocampus is essential for this integration and is vulnerable to stress. In an experiment, participants memorized paired images and later faced either an acute stressor involving a mock job interview with demanding tasks or a control condition with a speech and simpler mental math. Afterward, participants performed tasks requiring inference based on the relationship between previously learned images and new information while brain activity was measured.

"Acute stress makes it difficult to link memories of past events with fresh information, a study suggests. The results help to explain why people struggle to show insight under pressure. The study, published today in Science Advances, combined brain imaging and psychological testing to show how stress disrupts people's ability to tap into records of previous experiences and make deductions."

"Only connect. The brain connects new and old information to make inferences through a cognitive process called integration. For example, if you have a memory of your friend wearing a bright green jacket, and you see a bright green jacket on a park bench, you might integrate your memory and the visual input to infer that your friend is at the park. This ability can be impaired in individuals with some mental-health conditions, such as anxiety disorders and psychosis."

"The brain area called the hippocampus is essential for integration. Since it is also particularly vulnerable to stress, Lars Schwabe, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Hamburg in Germany, and his colleagues decided to test how acute stress would affect the brain's ability to integrate information and make inferences."

"On the experiment's first day, 121 participants were asked to memorize a series of paired images, each containing one image of an animal and one image of either a face or a scene. The next day, roughly half of the participants underwent a mock job interview that required them to defend their suitability for a hypothetical role and perform complex mental mathematics. Participants in the control group, meanwhile, were asked to give a speech about a topic of their choice and complete a simple mental maths task."

Read at Nature