Psychological stress impairs spatial working memory: relevance to electrophysiological studies of hippocampal function.
Stress blocks hippocampal primed-burst potentiation, a low threshold form of long-term potentiation, thereby suggesting that stress should also impair hippocampal-dependent memory. Therefore, the effects of stress on working (hippocampal-dependent) and reference (hippocampal-independent) memory were evaluated. Rats foraged for food in seven arms of a 14-arm radial maze. After they ate the food in four of the seven baited arms, they were placed in an unfamiliar environment (stress) for a 4-hr delay. At the end of the delay they were returned to the maze to locate the food in the 3 remaining baited arms. Stress impaired only working memory. Stress interfered with the retrieval of previously stored information (retrograde amnesia), but did not produce anterograde amnesia. Stress appears to induce a transient disruption of hippocampal function, which is revealed behaviorally as retrograde amnesia and physiologically as a blockade of synaptic plasticity.
Diamond
D M
DM
Department of Pharmacology, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Denver 80262, USA. d.diamond@uchsc.edu
Fleshner
M
M
Ingersoll
N
N
Rose
G M
GM
D000648:Amnesia, Retrograde / Q000503:physiopathology; D000818:Animals; D001070:Appetitive Behavior / Q000502:physiology; D001143:Arousal / Q000502:physiology*; D006624:Hippocampus / Q000503:physiopathology*; D017774:Long-Term Potentiation / Q000502:physiology; D008297:Male; D018782:Maze Learning / Q000502:physiology; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D009473:Neuronal Plasticity / Q000502:physiology; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology*; D051381:Rats; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley; D012931:Social Environment; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000150:complications* / Q000503:physiopathology