Impact of active and latent concerns about COVID-19 on multiple attention tasks

Abstract

Interactions between emotion and attention are complex and can vary depending on the task. Adding to this complexity, the COVID-19 pandemic altered the emotional landscape, heightening physical and financial concerns. If emotions interfere with attention, can heightened concerns about COVID-19 lead to impaired performance on tasks relying on attention? The multifaceted nature of attention means that the answer may differ across a broad range of attention tasks that rely on vastly different cognitive mechanisms. To explore the connection between heightened concerns about COVID-19 and attention, in a pre-registered study, we collected survey responses from 234 participants assessing levels of concerns surrounding COVID-19, followed by four psychophysics tasks that differed in terms of their demands on perceptual and central attention: visual search, visual working memory, a continuous performance task (CPT), and task switching. We also measured task-unrelated thoughts. Results showed that task-unrelated thoughts, but not survey reports of concern levels, negatively correlated with performance in the scene CPT and task switching, while visual search slope and working memory capacity remained robust to task-unrelated thoughts and survey-indicated concern levels. The two more cognitive-control-based tasks showed greater effects of heightened concerns than the two more perceptual tasks, but only when concerns were active in the form of task-unrelated thoughts. This study is the first to directly measure relationships between concerns about COVID-19 and performance on multiple attention tasks. The results show that the effects of heightened concerns on attention differ depending on task demands, as well as the extent to which concerns intrude into active thought. The broad spectrum of tasks allowed us to efficiently compare the effects of concerns on perceptual attention and central attention, allowing for more targeted assessments of tasks associated with specific components of attention in the future.