ArticlePsychoneuroendocrinology2019
Mild acute stress improves response speed without impairing accuracy or interference control in two selective attention tasks: Implications for theories of stress and cognition.
Article in Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Go with the (Blood) Flow: A Systematic Review on the Relationship Between Dynamic Functional Connectivity and Information Processing Speed.Neuropsychology review · 2026Pooled it
- Physical restraint induces conditioned place aversion and region-specific c-Fos activation in mice.Neuroscience letters · 2026Article
- Acute stress impairs visual narrative comprehension in younger but not older adults.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Physical restraint induces conditioned place aversion and region-specific c-Fos activation in mice.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Ten years Diffusion Model for Conflict (DMC) tasks: Theoretical foundations, applications, practical recommendations, and open challenges.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Neural Mechanisms of Social Homeostasis: Dynamic Range Plasticity.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Review
- Evidence for response inhibition as a control process distinct from the common executive function: A two-study factor analysis.Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · 2025Article
- The mediating role of anxiety and depressive symptoms on the relationship between physical limitations and cognitive impairment among older adults in China: differences based on religious perspective.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Comparative effects of single-task and dual-task acute moderate-intensity exercise on cortisol and cognitive performance.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Examining the applicability of virtual battle space for stress management training in military personnel-A validation study.Stress and health : journal of the International Society for the Investigation of Stress · 2024Article
- Association among childhood adversity and susceptibility to interference during varying salience: two studies in healthy males.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Sleep/wake regularity influences how stress shapes executive function.Frontiers in sleep · 2024Article
- Acute stress impacts reaction times in older but not in young adults in a flanker task.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Stress, associative learning, and decision-making.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2023Review
- The glucocorticoid footprint on the memory engram.Current opinion in endocrine and metabolic research · 2022Article
- Evaluation of changes in the cognitive function of adult cynomolgus monkeys under stress induced by audio-visual stimulation by applying modified finger maze test.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
- The association of the 5-HTTLPR polymorphism and the response to different stressors in healthy males.Journal of neural transmission (Vienna, Austria : 1996) · 2021Article
- First Demonstration of Double Dissociation between COMT-Met158 and COMT-Val158 Cognitive Performance When Stressed and When Calmer.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2021Article
- Promoting Successful Cognitive Aging: A Ten-Year Update.Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD · 2021Review
- Mental Resilience and Coping With Stress: A Comprehensive, Multi-level Model of Cognitive Processing, Decision Making, and Behavior.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Acute stress is generally thought to impair performance on tasks thought to rely on selective attention. This effect has been well established for moderate to severe stressors, but no study has examined how a mild stressor-the most common type of stressor-influences selective attention. In addition, no study to date has examined how stress influences the component processes involved in overall selective attention task performance, such as controlled attention, automatic attentional activation, decision-making, and motor abilities. To address these issues, we randomly assigned 107 participants to a mild acute stress or control condition. As expected, the mild acute stress condition showed a small but significant increase in cortisol relative to the control condition. Following the stressor, we assessed attention with two separate flanker tasks. One of these tasks was optimized to investigate component attentional processes using computational cognitive modeling, whereas the other task employed mouse-tracking to illustrate how response conflict unfolded over time. The results for both tasks showed that mild acute stress decreased response time (i.e., increased response speed) without influencing accuracy or interference control. Further, computational modeling and mouse-tracking analyses indicated that these effects were due to faster motor action execution time for chosen actions. Intriguingly, however, cortisol responses were unrelated to any of the observed effects of mild stress. These results have implications for theories of stress and cognition, and highlight the importance of considering motor processes in understanding the effects of stress on cognitive task performance.
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