Abstract
There is a conventional tale of stress, attention, and performance that goes as follows. External stressors, such as noise and threat, elevate the general arousal of the cerebral cortex, which in turn impacts the efficiency of information-processing and performance. According to the inverted-U principle, both the excessive arousal evoked by stimulating agents and the under-arousal associated with fatigue and sleep loss lead to impairment of attention. Unfortunately, this simple story is untrue. At the heart of the problem is the complexity of both arousal and attention. In this chapter, we will review the more subtle narrative that is emerging from studies of individual differences in subjective arousal.
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Some of this work was supported by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command under Contract No. DAMD17-04-C-0002. The views, opinions, and/or findings contained in this report are those of the author(s) and should not be construed as an official Department of the Army position, policy or decision unless so designated by other documentation. In the conduct of research where humans are the subjects, the investigator(s) adhered to the policies regarding the protection of human subjects as prescribed by 45 CFR 46 and 32 CFR 219 (Protection of Human Subjects).
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Matthews, G., Warm, J.S., Reinerman, L.E., Langheim, L.K., Saxby, D.J. (2010). Task Engagement, Attention, and Executive Control. In: Gruszka, A., Matthews, G., Szymura, B. (eds) Handbook of Individual Differences in Cognition. The Springer Series on Human Exceptionality. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1210-7_13
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