The effects of acute stress on human prefrontal working memory systems

Abstract

We examined the relationship between acute stress and prefrontal-cortex (PFC) based working memory (WM) systems using behavioral (Experiment 1) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI; Experiment 2) paradigms. Subjects performed a delayed-response item-recognition task, with alternating blocks of high and low WM demand trials. During scanning, participants performed this task under three stress conditions: cold stress (induced by cold-water hand-immersion), a room temperature water control (induced by tepid-water hand-immersion), and no-water control (no hand-immersion). Performance was affected by WM demand, but not stress. Cold stress elicited greater salivary cortisol readings in behavioral subjects, and greater PFC signal change in fMRI subjects, than control conditions. These results suggest that, under stress, increases in PFC activity may be necessary to mediate cognitive processes that maintain behavioral organization.

Acute stress enhances glutamatergic transmission in prefrontal cortex and facilitates working memory

“…Consistent with the beneficial effect of cortisol in young participants, inhibition of cortisol synthesis in older human subjects has been found to impair memory, which is reversed by restoring normal cortisol levels (27). The increased excitatory synaptic strength of PFC pyramidal neurons revealed in our study could also underlie the acute stress-elicited increase in PFC activity revealed from fMRI studies of human subjects (28), which is thought to be necessary to mediate cognitive processes for maintaining organized and complex human behavior.…”

Effects of acute psychosocial stress on working memory related brain activity in men

“…Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to capture potential neural correlates of memory phase-dependent effects of stress in the human brain. Based on the previous literature [Porcelli et al, 2008;Qin et al, 2009], we expected that stressed and nonstressed participants would differ in neural activity in areas related to WM maintenance [PFC and posterior parietal cortex (PPC); Fletcher and Henson, 2001;Purves et al, 2008]. We further hypothesised that stressed participants would show an increase in hippocampal activity during memory encoding, corresponding to improved encoding and subsequent memory previously reported for declarative memory tasks [Otten et al, 2001].…”

Studying the Perceptive and Cognitive Function Under the Stress of Match in Female Futsal Players

“…It has also been shown that one of the brain areas in humans affected by stress is the prefrontal cortex (8). As a matter of fact, studies carried out using functional brain imaging show that some parts of the prefrontal cortex are engaged in many tasks related to working memory and basic cognitive functions, such as attention and task management.…”