Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, 75 East River Road, S504 Elliott Hall, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA.
Center for Cognitive Sciences, University of Minnesota, 75 East River Road, S504 Elliott Hall, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2022 Jun 3;7(1):48. doi: 10.1186/s41235-022-00401-w.
The interactions between emotion and attention are complex due to the multifaceted nature of attention. Adding to this complexity, the COVID-19 pandemic has altered the emotional landscape, broadly heightening health and financial concerns. Can the heightened concerns about COVID-19 impair one or more of the components of attention? To explore the connection between heightened concerns about COVID-19 and attention, in a preregistered study, we collected survey responses from 234 participants assessing levels of concerns surrounding COVID-19, followed by four psychophysics tasks hypothesized to tap into different aspects of attention: visual search, working memory, sustained attention, and cognitive control. We also measured task-unrelated thoughts. Results showed that task-unrelated thoughts, but not survey reports of concern levels, negatively correlated with sustained attention and cognitive control, while visual search and working memory remained robust to task-unrelated thoughts and survey-indicated concern levels. As a whole, these findings suggest that being concerned about COVID-19 does not interfere with cognitive function unless the concerns are active in the form of task-unrelated thoughts.
由于注意力的多面性，情绪和注意力之间的相互作用非常复杂。此外，COVID-19 大流行改变了情绪格局，广泛加剧了对健康和经济的担忧。对 COVID-19 的担忧是否会损害注意力的一个或多个组成部分？为了探索 COVID-19 担忧加剧与注意力之间的联系，在一项预先注册的研究中，我们从 234 名参与者那里收集了评估 COVID-19 相关担忧水平的调查回复，随后进行了四项假设旨在探索注意力不同方面的心理物理学任务：视觉搜索、工作记忆、持续注意力和认知控制。我们还测量了与任务无关的想法。结果表明，与任务无关的想法，而不是对关注水平的调查报告，与持续注意力和认知控制呈负相关，而视觉搜索和工作记忆仍然不受与任务无关的想法和调查表明的关注水平的影响。总的来说，这些发现表明，对 COVID-19 的担忧不会干扰认知功能，除非这些担忧以与任务无关的想法的形式活跃。
