Do You Get Lost When You're Stressed? Blame Cortisol
A new study shows that the stress hormone cortisol impairs navigation skills.
Posted March 19, 2026 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
Getting lost in an unfamiliar environment, such as when exploring an unknown town in a foreign country while on vacation, can be a highly stressful experience. What had been largely unknown, though, is whether the reverse is also true—that is, whether being stressed also has negative effects on people’s spatial navigation skills. For example, are people worse at finding their way back to a location in an unfamiliar environment when they are stressed as compared to when they are calm?
A new study on how cortisol affects the brain’s internal navigation system
A new German study, published March 12, 2026, in the scientific journal PLOS Biology , was focused on understanding how the stress hormone cortisol affects people’s navigation abilities, and which brain areas are involved in this process ( Akan and co-workers, 2026 ). For the study, "Cortisol treatment impairs path integration and alters grid-like representations in the male human entorhinal cortex”, first author Osman Akan of the Department of Cognitive Psychology at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany and his co-authors used an intricate experimental design to study the effects of stress on navigation abilities. Overall, the scientists tested 40 German volunteers. Each volunteer was invited twice to the lab. On one day, they were given pills containing the stress hormone cortisol, and on the other day, identical-looking placebo pills. The volunteers did not know which was which.
On each testing day, the volunteers had to perform a computer-based navigation task called the apple game while lying in an MRI scanner as their brain function was assessed. In the virtual task, participants had to move to a virtual basket first and then to several trees, until they found a tree that contained a virtual red apple. Once they found a red apple, they were instructed to find the shortest possible way back to the basket. The volunteers performed two versions of this task, one without any helpful cues and one in which a virtual lighthouse helped them a bit in orienting themselves.
Cortisol impairs spatial navigation and alters brain function during navigation
When comparing the data from the cortisol and the placebo condition, the researchers found a clear result pattern: The stress hormone made the volunteers perform much worse in finding their way in the apple task than the placebo. This was true for both the condition with a virtual lighthouse present and the condition without any orienting help.
The neuroimaging data also revealed interesting insights. In the placebo condition, the brain behaved like it normally would in a navigation task. In this condition, the entorhinal cortex in the right half of the brain showed so-called grid-like representations. The entorhinal cortex is a brain area that plays a central role in spatial navigation and memory . It is a part of the brain’s cortex that is located close to the hippocampus, a brain area critical for many forms of memory, and acts as a sort of interface between the hippocampus and the rest of the brain. Importantly, the entorhinal cortex has many receptors for cortisol, making it a prime target for stress effects in the brain. Grid-like representations reflect the activity of so-called grid cells, a type of nerve cell in the entorhinal cortex that constitutes a positioning system in the brain. Basically, the activity of these types of nerve cells encodes a neural presentation of space similar to a map, which helps the person to orient. Importantly, the grid-like representations in the brain were diminished in the cortisol condition. Thus, stress makes the brain unable to use its internal navigation system properly.
Taken together, the results of the study showed that the stress hormone cortisol impairs the brain’s navigation ability. So the next time you explore a new town, make sure you are properly relaxed and not under stress to minimize your chances of getting lost.
Akan, O., Chandreswaran, V., Soldan, H. D., Bierbrauer, A., Axmacher, N., Wolf, O. T., & Merz, C. J. (2026). Cortisol treatment impairs path integration and alters grid-like representations in the male human entorhinal cortex. PLoS biology , 24 (3), e3003661. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003661
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Sebastian Ocklenburg, Ph.D., is a professor for research methods in psychology at the Department of Psychology at MSH Medical School in Hamburg, Germany. His research focuses on left-handedness and brain asymmetries.
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