“…Under stressful circumstances, people often fall short of their cognitive capabilities, which, of course, can carry numerous adverse consequences, such as being unable to maintain healthy lifestyle choices (Schneiderman et al, 2005) or underperforming in the decisive moment of an important competition (Yu, 2015). Indeed, a large body of work reveals that important cognitive capacities such as learning, memory, and decision-making are diminished by acute stress (Nitschke et al, 2020; Porcelli & Delgado, 2017; Schwabe & Wolf, 2013; Wirz et al, 2018), possibly because of a more fundamental stress-induced impairment to constituent cognitive processes, including working memory and set shifting (Bogdanov & Schwabe, 2016; Shields et al, 2016). Integrating these observations across behavioral repertoires, recent accounts have proposed that acute stress results in a shift away from flexible, effortful behavior toward more primitive and rigid, but less cognitively demanding, forms of control (Otto et al, 2013; Schwabe & Wolf, 2013; Wirz et al, 2018).…”