Structure and function of voltage-gated sodium channel Nav1.6: Involvement in the pathological process of neural injury.

Stress can impact how memories are formed, including how information is stored, what is remembered, and how accurately it is remembered (). Research examining the impact of stress on memory has primarily focused on event-based, person-level, psychological, and physiological experiences that are either induced in the lab or prompted by survey questions in an ecological setting. Recently, calls to advance stress research beyond conventional paradigms and toward interdisciplinary approaches that incorporate epidemiological perspectives with psychological methodologies have become more prominent (). This paradigm shift would allow stress to be conceptualized not only as a process that depends on individual experiences but also one that considers context, including socio-environmental factors that comprise lived experiences. Employing this approach to better understand memory formation is critical for identifying how structural and systematic exposures interact with individual-level psychological processing to impact key facets of cognitive health across the lifespan. This integrated framework, however, has yet to be incorporated into much of the extant stress and cognitive health research. To address this existing gap, we conducted a study assessing the impact of daily experiential psychological and physiological stress assessments and geo-located socio-environmental factors, including area density and socioeconomic resources, on memory processing in a large, diverse sample of U.S. adults. Existing research has demonstrated the varied ways memories are susceptible to acute stress exposures. For declarative memory, or memory for explicit facts, neural processing tends to prioritize information relevant to an acute stress event while reducing the psychophysiological resources dedicated to evaluating stress-irrelevant information (). For example, studies using daily assessments of stress have found that on days when individuals experience an acute stressor, memories of unrelated, proximal events are impaired (; ). Furthermore, under normative conditions (e.g., not trauma exposure), memories related to an acutely stressful experience have shown evidence of heightened recall of that experience and can result in adaptive responses that can be useful in shaping future behavior (; ). Importantly, maintaining stressor-relevant information during an acute stressor also has cognitive costs, including impairments in retrieving previously acquired memories (; ), goal-directed learning (; ), memory updating (Dongaonkar et al., 2013; Nitschke et al., 2019), and the generalization of memories () Critically, the changes that occur in the brain during a stress response are momentary and are not meant to be sustained for long periods. If the stress response is prolonged and becomes chronic, cognitive impairment and memory declines can occur (; ). Additionally, prioritizing stressor-relevant information can also be maladaptive and lead to psychological trauma (; ). Research to date has been unable to unpack the complex—and more realistic—scenarios that link stress and memory function. For example, investigations into how momentary acute stressors may differ from how persistent feelings of stress or overwhelm influence memory have been relatively neglected. In this study, we leveraged an ecological momentary assessment framework to probe participants’ daily stress levels on days with and without specific stress exposure. Instead of examining memory differences across “stressor present” and “no stressor” days, we explored how memory is shaped in both contexts: 1) after a self-reported acute stress event and 2) in the absence of a temporally relevant stress exposure but including a daily perceived stress assessment. By including a daily perceived stress variable, we can capture feelings of stress that do not have a temporally specific identifiable trigger. Thus, capturing the lingering and pervasive effects of stress and their subsequent impact on memory.