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Updated: Jul 18, 2025
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Assessment of Stress Effects on Cognitive Flexibility using an Operant Strategy Shifting Paradigm
Published on: May 4, 2020
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Stress, associative learning, and decision-making
Jacqueline Giovanniello1, Christian Bravo-Rivera2, Amiel Rosenkranz3
1Department of Psychology, University of California Los Angeles, United States.
Neurobiology of Learning and Memory
|August 20, 2023
Summary
Stress impacts associative learning and memory, sometimes impairing it and other times enhancing it. This can lead to maladaptive behaviors seen in psychiatric disorders, highlighting the need to understand stress
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Behavioral Psychology
- Psychiatry
Background:
- Stress significantly affects associative learning and memory mechanisms.
- Stress-induced behavioral changes can underlie psychiatric conditions like anxiety and substance use disorders.
- Understanding stress's dual role in adaptive vs. maladaptive behavior is crucial.
Approach:
- This review synthesizes findings on how stress impacts associative learning and decision-making in humans and non-human subjects.
- It examines the relationship between these stress-affected processes.
- The review considers how factors like sex and prior experience modulate these effects.
Key Points:
- Stress can impair or enhance associative learning based on various factors including stressor type, intensity, duration, subject's sex, context, and learning type.
- Stress often biases behavior towards less flexible strategies, indicating a reduced sensitivity to changing environmental conditions.
- Observed inflexibility in associative learning procedures warrants further investigation into modulating factors.
Conclusions:
- Stress-induced behavioral inflexibility is a key theme linking associative learning and decision-making.
- Clarifying the influence of sex and previous experience on this inflexibility is a critical future research goal.
- Understanding these mechanisms is vital for addressing stress-related psychiatric conditions.
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