Lab's work covered in Nature News

I’m excited to share that our recent study on stress and memory integration was featured in Nature News. The piece, titled “Stress impairs your brain’s ability to link memories — dampening insight,” highlights our finding that acute stress can make it harder for the brain to connect related experiences in memory and use those connections to support new inferences.

The study was led by Kai Schüren and Lars Schwabe at the University of Hamburg, in collaboration with Nicole Varga and me at UT Austin and Benno Roozendaal at Radboud University Medical Center. In the study, we asked how acute stress affects the ability to integrate related memories — a process that allows people to build knowledge across experiences rather than treat each event as isolated.

Using behavioral testing and neuroimaging, we found that stress did not simply prevent people from learning new information. Instead, stress reduced the hippocampal reactivation of related prior memories, limiting participants’ ability to link experiences together and draw new inferences from those links.

These findings speak to a broader question that has long motivated work in our lab: how memory supports flexible thinking. Memory is not only about preserving the past. Memory also allows us to connect experiences, extract structure, and use prior knowledge to guide behavior in new situations. Our results suggest that acute stress can disrupt those constructive memory processes, making it harder to generate insight when we are under pressure.

Read the Nature News coverage here, and read the full study in Science Advances here.