Keely Esch¹ (), Abigail Kortenhoeven¹, Michael Serra², Miranda Scolari¹; ¹Texas Tech University, ²Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center

Stress can have negative consequences on cognitive processes, including memory and attention. For example, meta-analysis revealed that stress negatively affects the accuracy of eyewitness recollection (Deffenbacher et al., 2004). Individuals experiencing high levels of acute stress may also experience attentional bias toward threatening stimuli, leading to higher detection rates for such items compared to their non-threatening counterparts (Putwain et al., 2011; Rued et al., 2019). To determine how stress may impact both visual overt attention and memory in the same task, we manipulated acute stress before presenting participants with a brief video of a criminal event. We administered the Maastricht Acute Stress Task (MAST; Shilton et al., 2017) to induce acute physiological stress within the experimental group (N = 28), and compared their performance to a non-stressed control group (N = 30). Both groups then watched publicly accessible CCTV footage from the Denver Police Department of a convenience store armed robbery while we tracked their eye movements across key elements of the scene. Self-report measures of stress revealed that the experimental group experienced higher levels of stress compared to the control group, as expected. The experimental group spent significantly more time fixating both relevant, threatening elements in the scene compared to the control group (including a robber and a robber’s gun), as well as relevant non-threatening items (the cash register). They also made more regressions to the employee’s face compared to the control group. Despite these fixation patterns to relevant elements, the experimental group performed marginally worse on a subsequent memory test of the event (p = 0.07). These results suggest that even just 10 minutes of physiological stress can impact the way individuals both attend to and remember important events.