Impact of active and latent concerns about COVID-19 on attention.

The interactions between emotion and attention are complex due to the multifaceted nature of attention. Adding to this complexity, the COVID-19 pandemic has altered the emotional landscape, broadly heightening health and financial concerns. Can the heightened concerns about COVID-19 impair one or more of the components of attention? To explore the connection between heightened concerns about COVID-19 and attention, in a preregistered study, we collected survey responses from 234 participants assessing levels of concerns surrounding COVID-19, followed by four psychophysics tasks hypothesized to tap into different aspects of attention: visual search, working memory, sustained attention, and cognitive control. We also measured task-unrelated thoughts. Results showed that task-unrelated thoughts, but not survey reports of concern levels, negatively correlated with sustained attention and cognitive control, while visual search and working memory remained robust to task-unrelated thoughts and survey-indicated concern levels. As a whole, these findings suggest that being concerned about COVID-19 does not interfere with cognitive function unless the concerns are active in the form of task-unrelated thoughts.

Characteristics of sustained attention in continuous performance task (CPT) and its variants

Many activities require us to sustain attention over time. Yet laboratory tasks using the continuous performance task (CPT) show that people are unable to sustain attention over a long time. What mechanisms underlie sustained attention and what factors account for the vigilance decline? Two theories provide different perspectives on these questions. One class, termed "underload" theories, postulates that the simplicity and tedium of continuous performance tasks drive people to withdraw attentional resources from the ongoing task, redirecting resources to task-unrelated thoughts. In contrast, "overload" theories propose that the need to maintain constant focus on a task drains attentional resources. As resources are depleted over time, fewer are available for completing a task, such as maintaining control over motor impulsivity. Bearing in mind these different theoretical perspectives, this dissertation investigates the underlying mechanisms of errors in a novel gradual-onset continuous performance task (gradCPT). Study 1 provided an independent replication of rapid vigilance decline in the gradCPT within three 8-min blocks. This study found that the rapid performance decrement was modulated by high task-required response rate, but not by the repetitive nature of the task stimuli or the low target prevalence. Using a within-subject design, Study 2 confirmed the deleterious effects of high task-required response rate on gradCPT performance. This study showed that, compared with abrupt onset, the gradual onset of images enhanced CPT performance, suggesting that the gradual transition of images attenuated motor impulsivity. Individual differences in the gradCPT correlated with performance on a stop-signal task, suggesting that response inhibition in the gradCPT reflects executive control. Study 3 tested the relationship between CPT performance and health and financial concerns about COVID-19 in the middle of the pandemic. This study showed that the severity of COVID-related concerns did not correlate with CPT performance. However, CPT performance was worse for participants who reported to engage in mind wandering more frequently during the CPT. Taken together, this dissertation provides converging evidence that response inhibition is a significant component of the gradCPT. These findings are consistent with overload theories, which posit that the CPT is attentionally demanding and the demand to control repetitive motor responses drains attentional resources. Some of the findings also provide partial support for the underload theories, which posit that errors in the CPT reflect the allocation of attentional resources towards task-unrelated thoughts. These findings are consistent with the resource control theory, which postulates that executive control is required to suppress task irrelevant thoughts and to control motor impulsivity in the CPT. More empirical evidence is needed to characterize the relationship between executive control and vigilance performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Do concerns about COVID-19 impair sustained attention?

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has considerably heightened health and financial concerns for many individuals. Similar concerns, such as those associated with poverty, impair performance on cognitive control tasks. If ongoing concerns about COVID-19 substantially increase the tendency to mind wander in tasks requiring sustained attention, these worries could degrade performance on a wide range of tasks, leading, for example, to increased traffic accidents, diminished educational achievement, and lower workplace productivity. In two pre-registered experiments, we investigated the degree to which young adults' concerns about COVID-19 correlated with their ability to sustain attention. Experiment 1 tested mainly European participants during an early phase of the pandemic. After completing a survey probing COVID-related concerns, participants engaged in a continuous performance task (CPT) over two, 4-min blocks, during which they responded to city scenes that occurred 90% of the time and withheld responses to mountain scenes that occurred 10% of the time. Despite large and stable individual differences, performance on the scene CPT did not significantly correlate with the severity of COVID-related concerns obtained from the survey. Experiment 2 tested US participants during a later phase of the pandemic. Once again, CPT performance did not significantly correlate with COVID concerns expressed in a pre-task survey. However, participants who had more task-unrelated thoughts performed more poorly on the CPT. These findings suggest that although COVID-19 increased anxiety in a broad swath of society, young adults are able to hold these concerns in a latent format, minimizing their impact on performance in a demanding sustained attention task.