Adverse effects of anxiety on attentional control differ as a function of experience: A simulated driving study

Abstract

This study tested whether adverse effects of state anxiety on attention and performance may be modulated by experience. Sixteen experienced and eleven inexperienced drivers drove in a simulator under low-and highstress conditions. Anxiety was manipulated by competition, the presence of an evaluator, external video camera, and traffic noise. Most drivers showed greater anxiety scores and higher mean heart rates following manipulation. In both groups increased state anxiety decreased car speed control and caused more collisions, accompanied by fewer fixations of longer duration towards the driving lane across a horizontally narrower region. Inexperienced drivers increased the number of short fixations towards cars, while experienced drivers increased the number of short fixations on the speedometer. Although anxiety impairs processing efficiency and performance effectiveness for both groups, attentional changes differ as a function of experience. Inexperienced drivers tended to shift attention to threatening stimuli, while experienced drives were more likely to consciously monitor task goal.

Effects of Ankle Muscle Fatigue and Visual Behavior on Postural Sway in Young Adults

“…Calibration was also checked periodically between trials. Gaze fixation was defined as the stabilization of gaze (when two times points of gaze standard deviation—95% confidence interval—were less than one degree of visual horizontal and vertical angles) over 99 ms (Rodrigues et al., 2016; Gotardi et al., 2019; Santinelli et al., 2019). We analyzed the following parameters: number of fixations, mean duration of fixations, normalized total duration of fixations (the sum of fixations divided by the duration of the trial), and the area of fixation displacement (area of an ellipse that contained 85% of the horizontal and vertical fixation position data; Rodrigues et al., 2016).…”

Translating Attentional Control Theory to Applied Psychological Eye Tracking Research

“…When anxious, these participants also spent significantly longer fixating the goalkeeper compared to goal location when preparing to take the penalty kick (i.e., where they wished to kick the ball). Anxious novice drivers will also exhibit similar patterns of gaze behaviour when performing a driving simulator task under stressful conditions; increasing the number of fixations ahead towards other cars on the road (i.e., increased fixations towards potential collisions) at the expense of fixating the rear-view mirror [29].…”

“…Within the domain of perceptual-motor performance, such attentional biases are often associated with impaired performance (e.g., penalty shots placed closer to the goalkeeper and increased collisions with other cars) [28,29]. 1.…”

When does the Brain Ask for Help from the Eyes?

“…Erratic eye movements appear with growing age [8,9] while pursuing slows down [10]. Also, stress causes erroneous eye movements, even in healthy athletes as well as in professionally calm officials like judges in court [11,12].…”

“…McSorly discussed the search to diminish uncertainty views [30,31] because -as said-reducing visual uncertainty causes recurrent saccades. For instance, Gotardi et al [12] discovered a difference between eye movements of drivers with and without anxiety. This concludes the motivation and application of this research.…”