Acute stress does not impair long-term memory retrieval in older people

Acute stress affects free recall and recognition of pictures differently depending on age and sex

“…To do so, we reanalyzed data from a group of older people [39] along with new data from a novel group of young participants, in order to compare their performance on a long-term memory retrieval task for pictures after a stress or control task. No significant stress effects were found on memory retrieval for positive, negative and neutral pictures in the older group.…”

“…By contrast, studies in animals and humans have shown a lack of stress and cortisol effects on working memory, spatial memory and declarative and non-declarative memory [33,[35][36][37][38]. To our knowledge, only one study investigated the effects of acute stress on long-term memory retrieval in a sample of older people, finding no effects of stress [39]. However, although some previous studies have used both older and young samples to investigate the effects of cortisol increases on learning [31], and a short-time after learning [33], there are no studies that have directly compared the effects of a stress-induced cortisol increase on long-term memory retrieval in young and older people.…”

“…There were no significant differences between the two (stress vs. control) conditions on age, educational level or body mass index (BMI) (p > 0.286). Partial results from the older subsample have been previously reported [39]. In the current study, we added a group of young participants to the previous study in order to test whether the same experimental design would show stress effects on longterm memory retrieval of pictures in young adults.…”

“…Finally, we also tested whether the participants' sex influenced the stress effects on retrieval, due to the existence of sex differences in the stress response and their effects on this type of memory. Based on the literature, we expected stress to impair long-term memory retrieval in young people [10,11,[13][14][15][16], but not in older people [39]. In addition, because sex-related differences in young people have been reported [40][41][42], we hypothesized that there would be a stronger impairing effect in young men, due to their expected higher cortisol response to the stressor [43][44][45] and the protective effects of estrogen in women [46].…”

“…In order to further examine the lack of cortisol effects on longterm memory retrieval in older people found in our previous study [39], we aimed to compare them to effects in young people. To do so, we investigated the stress effects on long-term memory retrieval performance for pictures in the older sample and in a novel sample of young people.…”