Cognitive Control Under Stress

Steinhauser, Marco; Maier, Martin E.; Hübner, Ronald · 2007 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01935.x

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Summary

This study investigates how stress influences cognitive control, specifically focusing on the strategies used for task-set reconfiguration during task shifting. While it is widely assumed that stress impairs cognitive processes by depleting central resources, the authors propose that the cognitive system may adapt to these depleted resources by adopting less capacity-demanding strategies. The research addresses a gap in the literature, as few studies have examined how motivational and affective states, particularly stress, affect the endogenous processes required to establish new task sets for goal-directed behavior. The experiment involved 40 subjects randomly assigned to low-stress or high-stress groups. Stress was induced using a modified intelligence test procedure: the low-stress group completed easy items with no time limit and no ego threat, while the high-stress group faced difficult items, strict time limits, and the threat of being compared to normative data. Following this induction, participants performed a task-shifting experiment using an explicit cuing paradigm. Subjects alternated between judging the parity of digits and the vowel/consonant status of letters, cued by visual shapes. The study manipulated the cue-stimulus interval (CSI), using either a short (200 ms) or long (1,000 ms) interval to determine if subjects engaged in anticipatory reconfiguration. Performance was measured via response times and error rates, with "shift costs" calculated as the difference in performance between task-shift and task-repetition trials. The results confirmed that the stress manipulation was effective, with the high-stress group reporting significantly higher subjective stress levels. In the low-stress group, shift costs decreased as the CSI increased, indicating the use of an optimal, anticipatory, and shift-specific reconfiguration strategy. In contrast, the high-stress group showed no reduction in shift costs with a longer CSI; their shift costs remained independent of the interval. This absence of the CSI effect suggests that under high stress, subjects abandoned the resource-intensive anticipatory strategy. The data indicated a trend toward both non-anticipatory reconfiguration and non-shift-specific reconfiguration (reconfiguring on every trial), suggesting a mixture of these less demanding strategies. The findings demonstrate that stress induces a qualitative change in cognitive control strategies rather than merely causing a general performance decline. Under high stress, individuals adopt reconfiguration strategies that require fewer cognitive resources, thereby maintaining goal-directed behavior despite depleted capacity. This supports the compensatory control framework, which posits that the cognitive system adapts to stress by selecting more efficient, albeit less optimal, processing modes. The study implies that variability in task-shifting literature may partly stem from differing stress levels in experimental settings and highlights the strategic nature of cognitive control under pressure.

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Topics

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• stress arousal performance
• task switching
• executive function