The Effect of Mental Stress on Brain Dynamics and Performance Related to Attention Control during a Vigilance Task: an Electroencephalographic

Title of dissertation: THE EFFECT OF MENTAL STRESS ON BRAIN DYNAMICS AND PERFORMANCE RELATED TO ATTENTION CONTROL DURING A VIGILANCE TASK: AN ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHIC INVESTIGATION Bartlett Anne Healy Russell, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Dissertation directed by: Professor Bradley D. Hatfield Neuroscience and Cognitive Sciences Program Department of Kinesiology Anxiety can increase distractibility and undermine the quality of psychomotor performance. Models of attention processing postulate that anxiety consumes limited executive resources necessary for maintaining goal-oriented, “top-down” attention control and suppressing stimulus-driven “bottom-up” distraction. Attention Control Theory (ACT) predicts that anxiety adversely affects the efficiency, and particularly inhibitory components of executive, frontally mediated top-down attention control. We used two approaches for examining this model. First, though attention affects synchrony among neural structures, information regarding how human oscillatory patterns (measured with electroencephalography, EEG) change as state anxiety increases is limited. Second, while anxiety affects the balance between top-down and bottom-up mechanisms, to our knowledge no one has yet measured anxiety’s effect on attention using a neural measure of top-down control in conjunction with more traditional bottom-up measures of attention capture (e.g., the P3 event related