Invitation to Psychology

ChaPteR 8 Memory 287

the perils of high stress and anxiety in a real-

life setting: the Horror Labyrinth of the London

Dungeon (Valentine & Mesout, 2009). The laby-

rinth is a maze of disorienting mirrored walls set in

Gothic vaults. As visitors walk through it, they hear

strange noises and screams, and alarming things

suddenly appear, including a “scary person”—an

actor dressed in a dark robe, wearing makeup to

appear scarred and bleeding. Volunteers wore a

wireless heart-rate monitor as they walked through

the labyrinth so that their stress and anxiety levels

could be recorded. The higher their stress and anx-

iety, the less able they were to accurately describe

the “scary person” later, and the fewer correct

identifications they made of him in a lineup.

Such effects on memory do not matter much

at an amusement attraction, but they can have

serious consequences when crime victims, police

officers, and combat soldiers must recall details

of a highly stressful experience, such as what hap-

pened during a shoot-out or the identity of an

enemy interrogator. The unintended effects of

misleading suggestions, combined with the effects

of extreme stress on memory, mean that we should

be especially cautious about how investigators

gather intelligence information from captured

suspected terrorists (Loftus, 2011).

We have given you just a few small nibbles

from the smorgasbord of findings now available

about the biology of memory. Neuroscientists

hope that someday they will be able to describe

the entire stream of events in the brain that occur

from the moment you say to yourself “I must

remember this” to the moment you actually do

remember... or find that you can’t.

of a memory at the time it is formed, so that even
though these aspects are stored in different corti-
cal sites, the memory can later be retrieved as one
coherent entity (Squire & Zola-Morgan, 1991).

Watch the Video The Basics: Do You Remember

When? at MyPsychLab

Hormones, Emotion, and

Memory LO 8.15

Have you ever smelled fresh cookies and recalled
a tender scene from your childhood? Do you have
a vivid memory of seeing a particularly horrifying
horror movie? Emotional memories such as these
are often especially intense, and the explanation
resides partly in our hormones.
Hormones released by the adrenal glands dur-
ing stress and emotional arousal, including epineph-
rine (adrenaline) and norepinephrine, can enhance
memory. If you give people a drug that prevents
their adrenal glands from producing these hor-
mones, they will remember less about emotional
stories they heard than a control group will (Cahill
et al., 1994). Conversely, if you give animals norepi-
nephrine right after learning, their memories will
improve. The link between emotional arousal and
memory makes evolutionary sense: Arousal tells the
brain that an event or piece of information is impor-
tant enough to encode and store for future use.
However, extreme arousal is not necessarily a
good thing. When animals or people are given very
high doses of stress hormones, their memories for
learned tasks sometimes suffer instead of improv-
ing; a moderate dose may be optimal (Andreano
& Cahill, 2006). Two psychologists demonstrated

Recite & Review

Recite: Let’s see whether your memory for this section has consolidated. Say out loud everything

you can about brain changes during short-term versus long-term memory, long-term potentiation,

consolidation, the role of the hippocampus, the location of long-term memories in the brain, and

hormonal influences on memory.

Review: Next, go back and read this section again.

Now take this Quick Quiz:

1. Is long-term potentiation associated with (a) increased responsiveness of certain receiving
   neurons to signals from transmitting neurons, (b) a decrease in receptors on certain receiving
   neurons, or (c) reaching your true potential?


2. The cerebellum has been associated with __ memories; the hippocampus has been
   associated with __ memories.


3. True or false: Hormone research suggests that if you want to remember well, you should be as
   relaxed as possible while learning.
   Answers:

Study and Review at MyPsychLab

false3. procedural, declarative2. a1.