The Effect of Anticipatory Anxiety on Performance in an Attention Task

1Stevens, C., 1, 2, 3Russell, B.A.H., 1,2Hatfield, B.D., 1Department of Kinesiology, School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park, 2Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program (NACS), University of Maryland, College Park, 3Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL), University of Maryland, College Park Purpose: Stress and mental anxiety are common features of daily life, including professional and sporting contexts. The effects of anxiety can have serious consequences, yet how anxiety affects performance in different contexts remains unclear. To better understand how anxiety affects performance the present study examined performance on a vigilance task during three levels of anticipatory anxiety. Methods: Over the course of two sessions, researchers measured the performance of college-age adults (N= 52) on a simple sustained attention task. One of the two sessions included “threat” (T) trials during which participants were at risk of receiving a mild electric finger shock, and “safe” (S) trials that included no threat of shock. The other session involved no shock and No Shock Day (NSD) trials. Self-report and magnitude of the eyeblink startle reflex to a white noise burst were measured to index anxious arousal. Efficiency and effectiveness were measured by reaction time (RT) and hit rate (HR), respectively and tested using a one-way, repeated-measures ANOVA. Results: Self report and mean startle amplitudes for each condition indicated the threat manipulation was effective in modulating anticipatory anxiety among participants. Participants exhibited the least anxiety during the NSD trials and the most during the T trials. Reaction time was significantly slower (RT) during the T condition compared to both the S and NSD conditions (RMANOVA: F(2,96) = 7.72, p = .003*; pairwise comparisons T:S, p ) . There was no significant difference in effectiveness (HR) among the three conditions (F(2,96) = .279, p = .709). Conclusion: Longer reaction times during the threat condition show a decrease in performance efficiency under anxiogenic conditions. A lack of significant difference in hit rate for the three experimental conditions shows that performance effectiveness may be more resistant to changes in anxious arousal than efficiency. These findings are consistent with Processing Efficiency Theory’s (PET) prediction that performance efficiency may be compromised by threat even if effectiveness does not suffer in the short term. Further research may investigate whether reduced efficiency erodes effectiveness over a longer timescale by increasing the energy cost of performance

Benefits of Sports Participation for Executive Function in Disabled Athletes

We investigated the effect of sports activity on physically-disabled individuals using behavioral and electrophysiological techniques. Visual go/no-go discriminative and simple response tasks were used. Participants included 17 disabled athletes, 9 from open-skill (wheelchair basketball) and eight from closed-skill (swimming) sports, and 18 healthy non-athletes. Reaction times of the disabled athletes were slower than those of healthy non-athletes on both tasks (7% and 13% difference, respectively). Intra-individual variations in reaction times, switch cost, and number of false alarms, were higher in the swimmers, but comparable to healthy non-athletes, in the basketball group. Event-related potentials (ERPs) early components P1, N1, and P2 had longer latencies in the disabled athletes. The late P3 component had longer latency and smaller amplitude in the disabled athletes only in the discriminative response task. The N2 component, which reflected inhibition/execution processing in the discriminative response task, was delayed and reduced in the swimmer group, but was comparable to healthy subjects in the basketball group. Our results show that (1) the ERP components related to perceptual processing, and late components related to executive processing, were impaired in disabled subjects; and (2) open-skill sports such as basketball may partially compensate for executive control impairment by fostering the stability of motor responses and favoring response flexibility