The effects of stress and anxiety on a cued attention task

Previous research has shown visual attention tasks like the Infant Orienting With Attention (IOWA) Task are effective in identifying individual differences in spatial attention (Ross-Sheehy et al., 2015). Given visual attention is influenced by factors like stress/anxiety (Grillon et al, 2016) it may be possible to use attention tasks to identify participants high in stress and/or anxiety. Fifty-four adults completed a modified version of the IOWA task. Participants then completed the Perceived Stress Scale and Beck Anxiety Inventory, and were divided into three groups: Low_Stress/Low_Anxiety (LSLA), High_Stress/Low_Anxiety (HSLA), and High_Stress/High_Anxiety (HSHA). A Condition x Stress Group ANOVA revealed only a main effect of Condition—Interestingly, stress group was not significant suggesting that reaction time was not influenced by anxiety or stress. We then assessed accuracy across stress groups using a one-way ANOVA. Results revealed a significant effect of stress group: HSLA subjects made significantly more errors than both LSLA and HSHA subjects. This suggests that although high stress was the best predictor of error rate, these errors were partially ameliorated by high levels of anxiety. We interpret this finding as evidence of hypervigilance, such that increased stress experienced by highly anxious individuals was more likely to trigger heightened control mechanisms.