New research from Stanford University has found that stress can hinder our ability to develop informed plans by preventing us from being able to make decisions based on memory.
New research from Stanford University has found that stress can hinder our ability to develop informed plans by preventing us from being able to make decisions based on memory.
“We draw on memory not just to project ourselves backward into the past but to project ourselves forward, to plan,” said Stanford psychologist Anthony Wagner, who is the senior author of the paper detailing this work, published April 2 in Current Biology. “Stress can rob you of the ability to draw on cognitive systems underlying memory and goal-directed behavior that enable you to solve problems more quickly, more efficiently and more effectively.”
Combined with previous work from Wagner’s Memory Lab and others, these findings could have broad implications for understanding how different people plan for the future – and how lack of stress may afford some people a greater neurologically-based opportunity to think ahead.
“It’s a form of neurocognitive privilege that people who are not stressed can draw on their memory systems to behave more optimally,” said Wagner, who is the Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences at Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. “And we may fail to actually appreciate that some individuals might not be behaving as effectively or efficiently because they are dealing with something, like a health or economic stressor, that reduces that privilege.”
Read more at Stanford University
Image by Sitanshu Kumar from Pixabay
