![]() ![]() Cognitive training improves cognitive functioning, which can increase working memory capacity and improve cognitive skills and functions in clinical populations with working memory deficiencies. Strategies Cognitive training ĭiscovering that the brain can change as a result of experience has resulted in the development of cognitive training. This over-response of the central nervous system to stress therefore causes maladaptive chronic stress-like effects to memory processing systems. Some individuals, for example, are not able to decrease or habituate their cortisol elevation, which plays a major role in hippocampal atrophy. It has been suggested that acute stress may have a protective function for individuals more vulnerable to their own stress hormones. One of the roles of the central nervous system (CNS) is to help adapt to stressful environments. Animal studies with rats have also shown that exposure to acute stress reduces the survival of hippocampal neurons. Īnimal and human studies provide evidence as they report that acute stress impairs the maintenance of short-term memory and working memory and aggravates neuropsychiatric disorders involved in short-term and working memory such as depression and schizophrenia. It is therefore important to selectively attend to relevant information and ignore irrelevant information in order to have the greatest success at remembering. Attention is crucial in memory processing and enhances encoding and strength of memory traces. Cognitive control processes such as selective attention reduce this competition by prioritizing where attentional resources are distributed. ![]() The human brain has a limited short-term memory capacity to process information, which results in constant competition between stimuli to become processed. Acute stress, a more common form of stress, results in the release of adrenal steroids resulting in impaired short-term and working memory processes such as selective attention, memory consolidation, as well as long-term potentiation.An example may be found in the London taxi drivers, as the anterior hippocampus was hypothesized to decrease in volume as a result of elevated cortisol levels from stress. ![]() Relative to other brain regions, the hippocampus has a high concentration of glucocorticoid receptors. Chronic, long-term high cortisol levels affect the degree of hippocampal atrophy, resulting in as much as a 14% hippocampal volume reduction and impaired hippocampus-dependent memory when compared to elderly subjects with decreased or moderate cortisol levels. Prolonged high cortisol levels, as seen in chronic stress, have been shown to result in reduced hippocampal volume as well as deficits in hippocampal-dependent memory, as seen in impaired declarative, episodic, spatial, and contextual memory performance. Elevated glucocorticoids, a class of adrenal steroid hormones, results in increased cortisol, a well known stress response hormone in the brain, and glucocorticoids are known to affect memory. The hippocampus is vulnerable to repeated stress due to adrenal steroid stress hormones.
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