Jenna Glotfelty¹, Ming-Ray Liao¹, Brad T. Stilwell¹, Brian A. Anderson¹; ¹Texas A&M

Humans tend to perform better cognitively when physically aroused. For instance, studies have found that physical arousal can lead to improvements in the executive control of attention. One approach is to use the attentional network task (ANT) after inducing physical arousal. This task is useful because it combines the well-studied spatial cueing and flanker paradigms, which can be used to measure the executive control of visual attention. Dynamic physical arousal can help to alleviate the influence of distracting information in the spatial cueing and flanker paradigms. However, dynamic arousal (e.g., cycling, running, swimming) is difficult to measure in the lab and might not be generalizable (e.g., less conducive to everyday settings like the classroom or office). Whether static arousal improves the control of attention in the same ways as dynamic arousal remains an open question. To test this question, our participants gripped a hand dynamometer for 18 seconds at maximum strength to evoke physical arousal (a technique previously demonstrated to elevate physical arousal). Then, participants completed the ANT. Participants were tasked with reporting the direction of a centrally presented target arrow (left or right) via a key press. The target was flanked by distractors that were either congruent with, incongruent with, or neutral with respect to the target response. Prior to the search array, nonpredictive, salient cues were presented. There were two conditions of physical arousal: grip versus no-grip. Results show that attention was captured by the salient cues (i.e., a cue-validity effect) and the flankers were distracting (i.e., a congruency effect). However, static physical arousal did not modulate either of these effects. These results suggest that, unlike dynamic physical arousal, static physical arousal may not influence the executive control of attention.