Visual Attention, Mental Stress and Gender: A Study Using Physiological Signals

Abstract

The relationship between visual attention and stress is a long-standing question in cognitive science. There are few studies which indicate improvement in visual attention under stress while few other studies suggest that stress affect visual attention negatively. Even though the mental stress is a critical issue in the modern age, only a few studies investigate the impact of mental stress on visual attention. Several studies on stress suggest that stress response could differ based on gender difference. However, none of the investigations compared the male vs female visual attention under mental stress. Additionally, although there are two broad class of visual attention, namely focused and selective attention, most of the studies investigated either the focused or selective visual attention. Moreover, the stress inducer used in most of the studies could generate pain and discomfort as well. The generated pain and discomfort may affect visual attention differently than just mental stress. This incompleteness and contradiction in previous research motivated us to carry out a full spectrum analysis of visual attention (focused and selective) under mental stress. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first time investigating the gender-wise visual attention (both focused and selective) performance under mental stress. We have used Rapid Serial Visual Processing (RSVP) to study the focused visual attention and Stroop task to study selective attention. We induced mental stress using the Montreal Imaging Stress Test (MIST). We also have used Electrodermal Activity Signal (EDA) and photoplethysmogram (PPG), a more robust method to study emotion, to study the participants' mental stress condition. We observed that focused attention gets better after mental stress induction (Median = 82.94 and std = 13.19) than before the stress (Median = 71.26 and std = 16.72), t (30) = 3.02889 and $\rho =$ .00183. Selective visual attention too improves significantly after stress induction (Median = 1682.54 and std = 286.91) than before stress (Median = 2100.58 and std = 397.40), t(30) = 4.67151 and $\rho $ = <; .00001. Furthermore, for both focused and selective visual attention, we observed that male and female both gender group had performed significantly well after stress induction than before stress. However, the gender difference does not show any statistically significant result in visual attention (both focused and selective) performance after stress induction.