Stressful events can have a pervasive influence on various memory processes, and many of our everyday decisions require us to retrieve relevant information from memory. How memory-based decision making is influenced by stress, however, remains unclear at this point.

In this preregistered study, participants were asked to make value-based decisions that required the retrieval of options (food snacks) from memory. After encoding the association of different snacks with different screen locations, a group of 78 participants were put under stress by holding their hand into ice water for three minutes, while the control group of 80 participants put their hand into lukewarm water. Afterwards, participants made memory-based decisions by retrieving the snacks via their associated locations on the screen as well as control decisions with visible snacks.

Hierarchical Bayesian statistical analyses revealed credible group differences in subjective ratings, blood pressure, and heart rate, thus confirming the successful manipulation of stress. As predicted, memory demands affected choice consistency and response times, and we successfully replicated a memory bias on value-based decisions. Surprisingly, the stress group made more consistent choices, with no other credible influences of stress on decision speed or memory accuracy. Modeling memory-based decisions with the Drift Diffusion Model (DDM) suggested a slightly increased drift rate and boundary separation for the stress compared to the control group.

Our work suggests that stress might have a negligible effect on simple value-based decisions from memory.