Elevated stress hormones (e.g. cortisol and norepinephrine) can selectively benefit the consolidation of emotional memories, as can the occurrence of sleep shortly after learning. I will discuss evidence, from behavioral, psychophysiological, and neuroimaging studies, suggesting that stress and arousal interact with sleep to augment memory consolidation, particularly for emotionally negative information, as well as how these relationships might change with age. I will present a model arguing that stress hormones help ‘tag’ emotional information as important to remember at the time of encoding, thus enabling subsequent, sleep-based plasticity processes to optimally consolidate emotional information in a selective manner.

Those wishing to meet the speaker should contact Kelley Swanberg. 

The Columbia Neuroscience Seminar series is a collaborative effort of Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Department of Neuroscience, the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior and the Columbia Translational Neuroscience Initiative, and with support from the Kavli Institute for Brain Science.