The Impact of Induced Stress Upon Selective Attention in Multiple Object Tracking

Abstract

The ability to filter distracting information and selectively attend to relevant information is critical to effective performance on the battlefield. In addition to the cognitive processing burden imposed upon modern warfighters, the effects of stress upon cognition and action must also be accounted for in evaluating individual warfighting capabilities. The current study examines the relationship between stress and cognition by measuring performance on a multiple object tracking (MOT) task after exposure to stress-inducing photographs. Postexposure performance revealed significant decrements in MOT accuracy relative to a nonstressed control group. Implications are discussed regarding the impact of stress on attentional selection for operational scenarios where it is difficult to distinguish friendly individuals from those with hostile intentions, as well as for the development of technology for command, control, communications (computers), and intelligence (C4I) systems.The benefits of advanced technological sophistication are frequently offset by human performance limitations. On today's "digital battlefield" the modern war-

Arousal-Biased Competition in Perception and Memory

“…Consistent with this possibility, after viewing a slide show of negative arousing pictures, participants were worse at tracking the location of multiple moving dots than were participants who viewed a slide show of neutral pictures (Morelli & Burton, 2009). Likewise, when shown a sequence of four pictures, each appearing in a different location, memory for the picture-location pairs over a short delay was worse if the four pictures were arousing (either positive or negative) than if they were neutral (Mather, et al, 2006; Mitchell, Mather, Johnson, Raye, & Greene, 2006).…”

“…However, when there are multiple stimuli competing for dominance, arousal interferes with distributing attention across multiple stimuli (Morelli & Burton, 2009) and maintaining multiple representations in working memory (Mather, et al, 2006; Mitchell, et al, 2006). This arousal-based impairment when multiple stimuli are equally the target of attention is consistent with the idea that when adjacent strong representations compete, it leads to mutual interference (Fig.…”

“…Arousal also amplifies the effects of directed attention toward one target stimulus or location (Phelps et al, 2006; Schupp et al, 2007), consistent with the ABC hypothesis that arousal enhances the effects of top–down relevance. However, when there are multiple stimuli competing for dominance, arousal interferes with distributing attention across multiple stimuli (Morelli & Burton, 2009) and maintaining multiple representations in working memory (Mather et al, 2006; K.J. Mitchell et al, 2006).…”

When anticipation beats accuracy: Threat alters memory for dynamic scenes

“…Indeed, avoidance-related emotions such as fear are known to produce narrowed, local processing at the expense of more global processing (e.g., Basso, Schefft, Ris, & Dember, 1996;Derryberry & Reed, 1998;Gasper & Clore, 2002). One advantage of restricted exaggeration of this sort may be more efficient processing of the threatening object, for which selective attention and action would be adaptive (Friedman & Förster, 2010;Grafton, Watkins, & MacLeod, 2012;Harmon-Jones, Price, & Gable, 2012;Kuhbandner et al, 2011;Morelli & Burton, 2009). …”

Pilots’ Attention Distributions Between Chasing a Moving Target and a Stationary Target

“…It indicates that saccadic paths are intentional and meaningful based on the requirements of the task in hand and the trajectory prediction in the near future (11). Therefore, the path of saccades is associated with selective attention and accurate judgments for perceptual targets (4,16). Saccade duration is the total time taken to make a saccade, which is recognized as one of indexes to assess operator's workload; e.g., increase in workload has been found to decrease saccade duration (20).…”