School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology.
Psychol Sci. 2023 May;34(5):552-567. doi: 10.1177/09567976231155870. Epub 2023 Mar 21.
The current study investigated how stress affects value-based decision-making during spatial navigation and different types of learning underlying decisions. Eighty-two adult participants (42 females) first learned to find object locations in a virtual environment from a fixed starting location (rigid learning) and then to find the same objects from unpredictable starting locations (flexible learning). Participants then decided whether to reach goal objects from the fixed or unpredictable starting location. We found that stress impairs rigid learning in females, and it does not impair, and even improves, flexible learning when performance with rigid learning is controlled for. Critically, examining how earlier learning influences subsequent decision-making using computational models, we found that stress reduces memory integration, making participants more likely to focus on recent memory and less likely to integrate information from other sources. Collectively, our results show how stress impacts different memory systems and the communication between memory and decision-making.
本研究调查了压力如何影响空间导航过程中的基于价值的决策，以及决策背后的不同类型的学习。82 名成年参与者（42 名女性）首先从固定起点（刚性学习）学习在虚拟环境中找到目标位置，然后从不可预测的起点（灵活学习）找到相同的目标。然后，参与者决定是从固定起点还是不可预测起点到达目标物体。我们发现，压力会损害女性的刚性学习，而在控制了刚性学习的表现后，它不会损害甚至可以改善灵活学习。重要的是，使用计算模型研究早期学习如何影响后续决策，我们发现压力会降低记忆整合，使参与者更倾向于关注近期记忆，而不太可能整合来自其他来源的信息。总的来说，我们的研究结果表明了压力如何影响不同的记忆系统以及记忆和决策之间的交流。
