City Research Online

Abstract

Adaptively responding to acute stress has been of great importance for human and animal survival. However, for our species, stress-related disorders are putting an ever-increasing burden on healthcare systems. It is thus crucial to understand the basic processes and cognitive changes associated with acute stress. Here, we examined the effects of acute stress exposure on spatial (water maze) and memory (delayed match to sample and episodic-memory-like tasks) performance. We found striking performance deficits in stressed animals navigating in the water maze. We also found, in an episodic-like memory task, striking object-location deficits, but not in temporal-object association learning in stressed animals. Finally, no differences were apparent for any delay periods (up to 30 s) in a delayed match to sample task. Taken together, these results show a strong differential effect of acute stress on differing memory processes.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2014, Elsevier. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publisher Keywords:	Acute stress; Spatial memory; Episodic memory; DMTS; Water maze; Reference memory
Subjects:	R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Departments:	School of Health & Psychological Sciences > Nursing
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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