Title:
How Stress Affects Concurrent Learning and Memory Integration during Decision-Making

dc.contributor.advisor Holder, Mary
dc.contributor.author Beveridge, Elizabeth
dc.contributor.committeeMember Brown, Thackery
dc.contributor.committeeMember Moffat, Scott
dc.contributor.department Neuroscience (Undergrad)
dc.date.accessioned 2022-05-27T14:37:51Z
dc.date.available 2022-05-27T14:37:51Z
dc.date.created 2022-05
dc.date.issued 2022-05
dc.date.submitted May 2022
dc.date.updated 2022-05-27T14:37:51Z
dc.description.abstract Spatial navigation presents as a realistic way to measure decision-making as acute stress has been shown to disrupt the hippocampal network involved in planning during navigation (Gagnon et al., 2018) and encourage the use of familiar routes over short-cuts (Brown et al., 2020). This planning during decision-making requires both memory retrieval and memory integration, the placement of weight on recalled past memories (He et al., 2022). While existing literature suggests acute stress impairs memory retrieval, there is no research on how stress affects memory integration during decision-making. To fill this critical gap in the literature, this study exposes half of its participants to stress via an electrical shock and uses a spatial navigation paradigm to measure how stress affects memory integration during decision-making. All 82 participants, divided roughly equally between gender and condition, navigated a virtual environment searching for goal objects. For each trial, the participant was prompted to decide between a familiar route with a lower payout or an unfamiliar route with a higher payout. For each participant, we used computational modeling to measure the degree of memory integration. We suspect that since stress impairs memory retrieval and decreases the use of shortcuts in spatial navigation, the degree of memory integration will decrease in the stress group. As hypothesized, participants in the stress group had significantly decreased memory integration than individuals in the control group (p=0.002), both expanding and validating the existing literature that acute stress impacts the prospective planning in decision-making during spatial navigation.
dc.description.degree Undergraduate
dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/1853/66724
dc.language.iso en_US
dc.publisher Georgia Institute of Technology
dc.subject Decision-Making
dc.subject Memory Integration
dc.subject Spatial Navigation
dc.title How Stress Affects Concurrent Learning and Memory Integration during Decision-Making
dc.type Text
dc.type.genre Undergraduate Thesis
dspace.entity.type Publication
local.contributor.corporatename School of Psychology
local.contributor.corporatename Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program
local.contributor.corporatename College of Sciences
local.relation.ispartofseries Undergraduate Research Option Theses
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication 768a3cd1-8d73-4d47-b418-0fc859ce897d
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication 0db885f5-939b-4de1-807b-f2ec73714200
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication 85042be6-2d68-4e07-b384-e1f908fae48a
relation.isSeriesOfPublication e1a827bd-cf25-4b83-ba24-70848b7036ac
thesis.degree.level Undergraduate
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