The emotional tagging: stress and the promotion of durable memories

LOPES DA CUNHA PAMELA; VILLAR MARIA EUGENIA; BALLARINI FABRICIO; LOPEZ MANUEL; VIOLA HAYDEE

Mar del Plata

Congreso; 30mo Congreso Anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias; 2015

Long -term memory (LTM) formation requires protein synthesis. We have demonstrated that a weak learning task which only induces short-term memory (STM) can be stabilized into LTM if another closer and novel experience provides the necessary proteins. It was postulated that these proteins could be capture at transient tagged sites induced by the weak learning task by a process referred to as behavioral tagging. As it is widely known that stress can modulate synaptic plasticity and enhace memory consolidation we decided to investigate whether acute stress could promote the formation of LTM from a weak training by providing the proteins necessary. For this purpose, rats were subject to a weak training (spatial object recognition-SOR) that only induce STM and, at different times close to training, they were exposed to stressful event (elevated plataform ?EP- for 30 min). We studied the dependence of this phenomenon on protein synthesis and also on glucocorticoids (GR) and mineralocorticoids receptors (MR) activity in the dorsal hippocampus. Finally, we present data aimed to investigate the role of stress induced by exams on the promotion of LTM in students.