Do concerns about COVID-19 impair sustained attention?

Jun, Jihyang; Toh, Yi Ni; Sisk, Caitlin A.; Remington, Roger W.; Lee, Vanessa G. · 2021 · DOAJ

DOI: 10.1186/s41235-021-00303-3

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Summary

This study investigates whether concerns regarding the COVID-19 pandemic impair sustained attention, a cognitive function critical for driving, learning, and workplace productivity. Motivated by evidence that internal worries and scarcity (such as poverty) can degrade cognitive control, the authors hypothesized that heightened health and financial anxieties during the pandemic might increase mind-wandering and reduce performance on attention-demanding tasks. The research aimed to determine if these widespread concerns exert a measurable cognitive load that interferes with vigilance. The researchers conducted two pre-registered experiments using a correlational design. Experiment 1 involved 161 young adults primarily from Europe during an early phase of the pandemic (June 2020), while Experiment 2 included 204 US participants during a later phase (February 2021). Participants first completed a survey assessing health-related, financial, and general COVID-19 concerns. They then performed a scene Continuous Performance Task (CPT), a demanding sustained attention test where participants responded to frequent city scenes (90% of trials) and withheld responses to infrequent mountain scenes (10%) over two 4-minute blocks. Performance was measured using detection sensitivity (A’) and the rate of performance decline over time. The results indicated that despite large individual differences in both the severity of COVID-19 concerns and CPT performance, there was no significant correlation between the two. In Experiment 1, health and financial concerns did not correlate with overall A’ or the reduction in A’ across blocks. Bayesian analysis provided substantial evidence for the null hypothesis, suggesting that higher anxiety levels did not predict poorer attentional performance. Experiment 2 replicated these findings; however, it revealed that participants who reported more task-unrelated thoughts performed worse on the CPT. This suggests that while general concerns did not impair attention, actual mind-wandering during the task did. The study concludes that young adults are capable of holding pandemic-related concerns in a latent format, minimizing their impact on performance in demanding sustained attention tasks. Although COVID-19 increased anxiety across society, these moderate concerns did not translate into measurable deficits in vigilance. The findings imply that attentional functions remain robust in the presence of moderate anxiety, suggesting that safety and workplace practices may not need adjustment based on general pandemic worry alone. Instead, the focus should remain on narrower, more severe mental health issues or specific instances of mind-wandering rather than broad anxiety levels.

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• stress arousal performance