Do Concerns about COVID-19 Impair Sustained Attention?

Autor/inn/en	Jun, Jihyang; Toh, Yi Ni; Sisk, Caitlin A.; Remington, Roger W.; Lee, Vanessa G.
Titel	Do Concerns about COVID-19 Impair Sustained Attention?
Quelle	In: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 6 (2021), Artikel 41 (15 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Zusatzinformation	ORCID (Jun, Jihyang)
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	2365-7464
DOI	10.1186/s41235-021-00303-3
Schlagwörter	COVID-19; Pandemics; Attention Span; Young Adults; Anxiety; Correlation; Foreign Countries; Performance; Europe; United States + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Young adult; Junger Erwachsener; Angst; Korrelation; Ausland; Achievement; Leistung; Europa; USA
Abstract	The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has considerably heightened health and financial concerns for many individuals. Similar concerns, such as those associated with poverty, impair performance on cognitive control tasks. If ongoing concerns about COVID-19 substantially increase the tendency to mind wander in tasks requiring sustained attention, these worries could degrade performance on a wide range of tasks, leading, for example, to increased traffic accidents, diminished educational achievement, and lower workplace productivity. In two pre-registered experiments, we investigated the degree to which young adults' concerns about COVID-19 correlated with their ability to sustain attention. Experiment 1 tested mainly European participants during an early phase of the pandemic. After completing a survey probing COVID-related concerns, participants engaged in a continuous performance task (CPT) over two, 4-min blocks, during which they responded to city scenes that occurred 90% of the time and withheld responses to mountain scenes that occurred 10% of the time. Despite large and stable individual differences, performance on the scene CPT did not significantly correlate with the severity of COVID-related concerns obtained from the survey. Experiment 2 tested US participants during a later phase of the pandemic. Once again, CPT performance did not significantly correlate with COVID concerns expressed in a pre-task survey. However, participants who had more task-unrelated thoughts performed more poorly on the CPT. These findings suggest that although COVID-19 increased anxiety in a broad swath of society, young adults are able to hold these concerns in a latent format, minimizing their impact on performance in a demanding sustained attention task. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01