People recall important information and maintain this ability despite
memory impairment by aging, distraction or rushing. Early-life stress (ELS)
is associated with atypical development of three brain regions likely
involved in memory: the hippocampus (Youssef, 2019), amygdala (Tottenham,
2010) and nucleus accumbens (Go, 2013). Assuming exposure to ELS amplifies
the effects of acute stress (Kuhlman, 2018), we predict high ELS will
impair selectivity for remembering important information. Of 93
undergraduates at the University of California, Los Angeles, half underwent
acute stress induction via the Trier Social Stress Test, in which
participants delivered a speech and performed mental arithmetic for an
audience. Participants studied lists of words with arbitrary point values
assigned to them. Evidence of impaired selectivity for remembering
important information during acute stress was shown among individuals who
had ELS. This impairment may reflect a sensitization to acute stress and
the perturbation of the neural machinery of reward and value calculations
among individuals exposed to ELS. Future work using fMRI will assess the
neural mechanisms responsible for these effects.