Emotion-Induced Amnesia in Rats: Working Memory Specific Impairment, Corticosterone-Memory Correlation, and Fear Versus Arousal Effects on Memory.

Have you ever gone to see a really scary movie only to come out and forget where you parked you car? Did you stop to think about why you forgot? What was going on in your brain to make you forget? Well in the experiment you are about to learn, the psychologists attempted to do just that, only their subjects were rats. Previous experiments have shown that stress impairs memory, more specifically, spatial memory. This …

…corticosterone levels. Corticosterone provides a measurement of the level of an animal's arousal. In the experiment the level of corticosterone was higher in both the cat and female rat exposures. However the number of errors the female exposed rats made was significantly less. The conclusions based on these experiments show that corticosterone levels, when in conjunction with fear (cat) inhibit working memory. However, the ability to relearn the information shows that this effect is temporary.