How much does feeling nervous affect your ability to remember? You show twenty boys and twenty girls a set of twenty-five objects for two minutes. In the calm round, they write down every object they recall. In the anxious round, each person is told just before reciting that they are being graded and watched by an assessor. Under calm conditions, both boys and girls remember about seventeen to eighteen objects on average. Under anxiety, that number drops to fewer than seven for both groups. This project measures how a sudden stressful situation can cut short-term memory by more than half.