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The Neural Mechanisms of Working Memory Under Acute Stress

Poster Session D - Monday, March 9, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Jenna Al Taher^1,2 (), Gayathri Satheesh^1,2, Kartik K Sreenivasan^1,2; ¹Center for Brain and Health, New York University Abu Dhabi, ²Division of Science and Mathematics, New York University Abu Dhabi

Acute stress is known to impair working memory (WM), but the underlying neural mechanisms remain unknown. We investigated the hypothesis that acute stress disrupts top-down modulatory input from the prefrontal cortex (PFC) to sensory regions that store WM representations weakening representational fidelity in these regions. This hypothesis was motivated by (1) well-established findings that acute stress triggers hyperdopaminergic release in PFC, impairing its function, and (2) recent proposals that top-down input from PFC to sensory regions sculpts the precision of sensory WM representations. To test our hypothesis, we had participants complete a modified N-back WM task with face and scene stimuli across separate stress and control sessions while recording brain activity using fMRI. Stress was induced using the socially evaluative cold pressor test. We predicted that acute stress would result in (1) PFC hypoactivation; (2) reduced distinctiveness of WM representations in sensory regions; and (3) reduced connectivity between PFC and sensory regions. Preliminary analyses from four subjects showed that stress impaired WM performance (accuracy and reaction time), consistent with previous findings. In line with our first two predictions, we observed a trend toward reduced BOLD activation in the PFC and lower classification accuracy when decoding within-category (attended vs. ignored) stimuli from face-selective visual regions. Future analyses will incorporate functional connectivity measures, physiological markers of stress, and account for baseline differences in participants’ dopamine function in order to further elucidate how stress alters WM processes.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Working memory