Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors, Ardeystr. 67, 44139, Dortmund, Germany.
Division of Clinical Psychophysiology, Institute of Psychobiology, University of Trier, 54290, Trier, Germany.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2022 Aug;22(4):722-735. doi: 10.3758/s13415-022-00994-1. Epub 2022 Apr 5.
Stress is assumed to inhibit the top-down control of attention and to facilitate bottom-up processing. Evidence from human experiments, however, remains scarce. Previous studies have addressed how stress affects the interplay of bottom-up and top-down mechanisms of attention. A key open question is in how far such effects can actually be attributed to a stress-induced modulation of top-down attention control. We sought to isolate top-down from bottom-up effects by assessing stress effects on anticipatory changes in alpha oscillations that precede stimulus processing. Participants performed in a cued target detection task in which a cue prompted them to covertly shift their attention to left or right screen positions, 20 min after being exposed to the bilateral feet cold pressor test or a warm water control procedure. The stressor led to a substantial increase in cortisol, peaking 20 min post stressor, along with rises in heart rate, blood pressure, and subjective ratings of stress and arousal. As expected, cued attention deployment led to higher alpha power over posterior electrodes contralateral versus ipsilateral to the attended hemifield during the cue-target interval. Importantly, this purely endogenous effect was potentiated by stress, however, significant differences were restricted to the middle of the cue-target interval and thus temporally separated from the appearance of the target. These results indicate that stress does not impair top-down attentional control per se but may introduce a qualitative change modulating the way attention is deployed to meet action goals.
压力被认为会抑制注意力的自上而下控制，并促进自下而上的加工。然而，来自人类实验的证据仍然很少。以前的研究已经解决了压力如何影响注意力的自下而上和自上而下机制的相互作用。一个关键的悬而未决的问题是，这些影响实际上在多大程度上可以归因于压力引起的自上而下的注意力控制的调制。我们试图通过评估在刺激处理之前的 alpha 振荡的预期变化来分离自上而下和自下而上的影响，从而隔离自上而下的影响。参与者在提示目标检测任务中表现，在该任务中，提示促使他们将注意力 covertly 转移到屏幕左侧或右侧位置，在暴露于双侧脚冷压迫测试或温水对照程序 20 分钟后。应激源导致皮质醇显著增加，在应激后 20 分钟达到峰值，同时心率、血压和应激和唤醒的主观评分升高。正如预期的那样，在 cue-target 间隔期间，与注视半球相对应的后电极上的 cue 注意力部署导致更高的 alpha 功率。重要的是，这种纯粹的内源性效应被压力增强，然而，显著的差异仅限于 cue-target 间隔的中间，因此与目标的出现时间上分开。这些结果表明，压力本身不会损害自上而下的注意力控制，但可能会引入一种定性变化，从而调节注意力的部署方式以满足行动目标。
