No abstract

Acute stress has a profound effect on attention selection, however, it remains unclear how acute stress affects target enhancement and distractor suppression in attention selection. The current study aimed to investigated the acute stress effect on target enhancement and distractor suppression in a visual search task by using ERP. The stress response was successfully induced as indexed by the activation of HPA and the subjective affect rating. Crucially, acute stress group showed significant smaller N2pc than the control group in the high-salience distractor condition, no significant differences of Pd was observed, which indicated that actue stress disrupts the target enhancement rather than the distractor suppression in attention selection. The detrimental effects might attribute to the impairing function of prefrontal cortex. The current study provide clear evidences of the impairment of target enhancement under acute stress, and reveal the cognitive mechanism of acute stress effects on attention selection.

Previous studies showed that working memory (WM) content can guide attention; however, whether working memory capacity (WMC) and state anxiety could affect this remains unclear. This study aimed to examine the effect of WMC and state anxiety on attention guided by WM content. Participants with high and low WMC were assigned to either a neutral or an anxiety condition. They were asked to perform a modified change detection task with irrelevant singletons while their event-related potentials were recorded. N2pc and Pd were observed in the low-WMC and anxiety group, and Pd was observed in both the high-WMC and anxiety and the high-WMC and control groups, whereas neither N2pc nor Pd was found in the low-WMC and control group. These findings suggest that attention is guided or suppressed by WM content, depending on the WMC and anxiety level of the individual. This study provides a new perspective on WM content-guided attention.