The effect of stress on memory for temporal context

Stress and emotional arousal interfere with encoding of temporal context memory for episodic events. However, it remains unclear how stress affects more fine-grained temporal memory, such as episodic events sequences and event times. Here, 86 healthy participants (M age = 22.5; 46% women, 54% men) were subjected to either a stress condition (socially evaluated cold pressor test) or a control condition, directly after or at a delay of 30 minutes they were presented the temporal structure of four virtual days. In these virtual days, time was scaled and participants could use clock cues to construe the passage of time within a day. We examined whether acute stress would interfere with encoding of episodic event sequences and temporal memory. Our results show that when learning took place directly after a stressor, virtual time estimates were more strongly biased towards a generalized timeline but temporal memory overall was not differentially affected between the stress and control groups. Exploratory analyses suggest that memory accuracy improved in men and deteriorated in women as a function of subjective stress levels following acute stress. In conclusion, acute stress amplified memory generalization but we found no stress related differences in memory accuracy across levels of temporal granularity.