The Effect of Stress on Visuo-Spatial Working Memory

Stressful events are known to affect a range of cognitive functions, such as attention, memory formation and memory recall. With regard to visuo-spatial working memory, the relationship is particularly complex. In part, this complexity arises from an incomplete picture of visuo-spatial working memory that does not fit well with the experimental literature. The aim of the present study is to reconcile this issue and to investigate the influence of cortisol, a stress hormone, on two visuo-spatial working memory tasks that are typically used to represent visual storage and visual processing, respectively. The study also aims to explore how workload affects performance on these tasks. The Trier Social Stress Task, a task known to induce social-evaluative stress, was administered to half of the participants studied. Performance on low and high workload versions of a visuo-spatial storage task (delayed pattern matching) and a visual processing task (mental rotation) were compared between stress and control groups. Preliminary results reveal a trend toward higher performance only in the visual processing task at high workloads in the stress condition. This trend suggests that different mechanisms influence delayed pattern matching and mental rotation, especially at high workloads. Genetic analysis of polymorphisms known to be correlated with individual differences in executive functioning, especially during stress events, may provide further insight into these differences.