Stress effects on students long term memory

LOPES DA CUNHA PAMELA; CHISARI LUCIA; BALLARINI FABRICIO; VIOLA HAYDEE

Mar del Plata

Congreso; 32nd Annual Congress of Argentine Society of Neuroscience Research; 2017

Long-term memory (LTM) formation requires protein synthesis. We have demonstrated in rodents that a weak learning task (spatial object recognition-SOR) which only induces short-term memory (STM) can be stabilized into LTM if an event of acute stress is experienced 1 hour after. It was postulated that stress provides the necessary proteins, which could be captured at tagged sites induced by the weak learning task, process referred as behavioral tagging. Moreover, it was observed that if stress occurs 1 hour before learning is not able to promote a LTM and results suggest an effect of stress on the learning tag. Surprisingly, when the rats were submitted to strong SOR (which induces LTM) and were exposed to stress 1 hour after training, SOR-LTM was impaired and we postulated that could be due to competition for resources necessary for memory consolidation. In the present work, we want to assess if an acute stress could induce similar effects in humans. We made activities using a modification of the Rey-Osterrieth?s complex figure task to test graphic memory in students and analyze the effects of exams on the promotion of LTM and its temporal course. The behavioral results are similar to those found in rodents and they also depend on the memory index score of the students´ population considered. When students have a programmed exam before learning they do not show LTM promotion, while students who have an exam 60 min after learning show positive or negative effects on figure retention depending of the learning strength.