Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, California, USA; Center for Neuroscience, University of California, Davis, California, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, CA.
Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2019 Oct;108:78-86. doi: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2019.06.001. Epub 2019 Jun 8.
Acute stress is generally thought to impair performance on tasks thought to rely on selective attention. This effect has been well established for moderate to severe stressors, but no study has examined how a mild stressor-the most common type of stressor-influences selective attention. In addition, no study to date has examined how stress influences the component processes involved in overall selective attention task performance, such as controlled attention, automatic attentional activation, decision-making, and motor abilities. To address these issues, we randomly assigned 107 participants to a mild acute stress or control condition. As expected, the mild acute stress condition showed a small but significant increase in cortisol relative to the control condition. Following the stressor, we assessed attention with two separate flanker tasks. One of these tasks was optimized to investigate component attentional processes using computational cognitive modeling, whereas the other task employed mouse-tracking to illustrate how response conflict unfolded over time. The results for both tasks showed that mild acute stress decreased response time (i.e., increased response speed) without influencing accuracy or interference control. Further, computational modeling and mouse-tracking analyses indicated that these effects were due to faster motor action execution time for chosen actions. Intriguingly, however, cortisol responses were unrelated to any of the observed effects of mild stress. These results have implications for theories of stress and cognition, and highlight the importance of considering motor processes in understanding the effects of stress on cognitive task performance.
急性应激通常被认为会损害被认为依赖选择性注意的任务表现。这种效应在中等至严重的应激源中得到了很好的证实，但没有研究探讨轻度应激源——最常见的应激源——如何影响选择性注意。此外，迄今为止，没有研究探讨应激如何影响整体选择性注意任务表现所涉及的组成过程，例如控制注意、自动注意激活、决策和运动能力。为了解决这些问题，我们随机将 107 名参与者分配到轻度急性应激或对照条件中。正如预期的那样，与对照条件相比，轻度急性应激条件下皮质醇水平略有但显著升高。在应激源之后，我们使用两种不同的侧抑制任务评估注意力。其中一个任务通过计算认知建模来优化，以研究组成注意过程，而另一个任务则使用鼠标跟踪来说明响应冲突如何随时间展开。这两个任务的结果都表明，轻度急性应激会缩短反应时间（即提高反应速度），而不会影响准确性或干扰控制。此外，计算建模和鼠标跟踪分析表明，这些影响是由于选择动作的更快的运动动作执行时间所致。然而，有趣的是，皮质醇反应与轻度应激的任何观察到的影响都无关。这些结果对压力和认知理论具有影响，并强调了在理解压力对认知任务表现的影响时考虑运动过程的重要性。
