Seehagen Sabine, Schneider Silvia, Rudolph Julia, Ernst Stephanie, Zmyj Norbert
Department of Psychology, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany;
Department of Psychology, Technical University of Dortmund, 44221 Dortmund, Germany.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2015 Oct 13;112(41):12882-6. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1508345112. Epub 2015 Sep 28.
In human adults, learning and memory under acute stress are characterized by an increased use of rigid habitual response strategies at the cost of flexible cognitive strategies. The immediate effects of stress on cognitive functioning early in life are not well understood. Here we show experimentally that acute stress leads human infants to perform habitual behavior rigidly. We found that 15-mo-old infants exposed to stress thereafter kept performing a previously effective action, even after the action suddenly became ineffective. Infants in a no-stress control group flexibly adjusted their behavior by disengaging from the newly ineffective action in favor of exploring an alternative action. This finding demonstrates that stress impairs infants' ability to adjust their behavior to changing circumstances.
在成年人类中，急性应激状态下的学习和记忆表现为更多地使用刻板的习惯性反应策略，而牺牲了灵活的认知策略。应激对生命早期认知功能的即时影响尚不清楚。在此，我们通过实验表明，急性应激会导致人类婴儿刻板地执行习惯性行为。我们发现，此后暴露于应激状态下的15个月大婴儿会持续执行先前有效的动作，即使该动作突然变得无效。无应激对照组的婴儿则通过放弃新的无效动作转而探索替代动作，灵活地调整了他们的行为。这一发现表明，应激会损害婴儿根据环境变化调整行为的能力。
