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RESEARCH PRODUCT

AGE DIFFERENCES IN THE ACUTE STRESS EFFECTS ON DECLARATIVE MEMORY PERFORMANCE

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"In the last decades, there has been a growing interest in knowing the effects of acute stress on memory performance, particularly declarative memory. Research on this topic suggests that age is a crucial individual factor to consider in the stress-memory link. However, most of the evidence has been obtained from studies conducted in young people and, surprisingly, studies in older people are scarce. Thus, our aim was to investigate the age differences in the acute stress effects on declarative memory performance. To do this, we directly compared the effects of a psychosocial acute stressor (i.e. Trier Social Stress Test) on learning, consolidation and memory retrieval performance in two age groups (young: 18-35 years vs. 54- 78 years). As expected, worse memory performance was associated with age. Overall, stress did not affect learning, consolidation and memory retrieval performance in older people. However, stress caused greater interference in the older people’s memory performance than a control task, but this result was not found in young people. In addition, stress impaired retrieval performance in young men but not in older people. Our results suggest that age moderates the stress-induced effects on declarative memory. In addition, they support the idea that older people could be less sensitive to acute stress effects on memory probably due to an age-related reduction of the sensitivity and density of the glucocorticoid receptors and a decrease in the functional amygdala and hippocampus interconnectivity."