Abstract
Acute stress has a profound impact on attention selection. However, the cognitive mechanism of acute stress on attention selection for neutral stimuli remains unclear. The current study aimed to investigate how acute stress affects target enhancement and distractor suppression in attention selection using a visual search task while EEG was recorded. The Maastricht Acute Stress Test was successfully induced a stress response in the stress group, as indexed by the higher salivary cortisol, state anxiety, and negative emotion. Crucially, the stress group showed significantly smaller N2pc than the control group in the lateral target/midline and contralateral distractor conditions when the distractor salience was high, whereas no significant differences in the Pd were observed in the lateral distractor/midline target condition. These results suggest that acute stress impairs target enhancement rather than distractor suppression in attention selection. This impairment may be due to the impaired function of the prefrontal cortex under acute stress. The present research provides the first insight into the cognitive mechanism of acute stress on attention selection.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
This work was funded by a National Natural Science Foundation of China (32260209), Basic Research Program of Guizhou Province (Qiankehe Jichu-ZK[2023] General-276) and Department of Education of Guizhou Province (Qianjiaohe YJSKYJ 〔2021〕 107). The authors declare no competing interests. The study was not pre-registered. The datasets used in these analyses have been made publicly available via the Science Data Bank (Science DB) and can be accessed at: http://cstr.cn/31253.11.sciencedb.02116. The paper was posted in BioRxiv as a preprint and can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.09.16.508346.
Yu Luo served as lead for data curation, formal analysis, and validation and contributed equally to conceptualization, funding acquisition, writing–original draft, and writing–review and editing. Jingqing Nian served in a supporting role for data curation, formal analysis and writing–original draft. Run Yang served in a supporting role for data curation, formal analysis. Jiao Xie served in a supporting role for data curation, formal analysis. Yu Zhang served as lead for conceptualization, funding acquisition, supervision, writing–original draft, and writing–review and editing.
Significant changes have been made to the introduction and discussion.
