Re: How do environmental stressors, such as noise, effect memory?

The question of how the environment affects memory performance has been 
widely studied.  Several basic patterns have emerged.  One is the obvious 
fact that if noise or other stimuli are intense enough to attract attention, 
and especially if they are intense enough to cause discomfort, it is 
difficult to either encode new information in memory, or to recall old 
information.  Another pattern is that people tend to get used to 
(habituate to) certain stimuli which then no longer attract attention.  For 
those, the memory interference goes away.  Interference generally affects 
encoding more than retrieval.

Another interesting phenomenon is called "state-dependent learning."  This 
refers to scientific findings that it is generally easier to recall 
information if the environment you are in when you try to retrieve is 
similar to that in which you encoded the info in the first place.  For 
instance, if you learned (encoded) something while in a warm, dark room 
after having drank some coffee, it will be easier to recall later on if any 
or all of those factors (dark, warm, coffee) are present.