Anxiety's effect on direct attention fatigue

Research has suggested that the use of sustained direct attention can result in a fatiguing effect. Itis believed that this attention fatigue is specific to direct attention, which is an intentionalcognitive process. Direct attention serves to focus a person’s cognition on selected informationso that the targeted information may be processed. If common activities fatigue attention then itis possible that these important processes may be less efficient. A common daily experience issocial evaluation. For many people, perhaps most people, social evaluation evokes anxiety. It ispossible that the feeling of anxiety can act as a powerful distractor requiring you to useintentional direct attention. Thus, performing while feeling anxiety may result in attentionfatigue. To test whether anxiety could cause attention fatigue, 54 undergraduates performed amodified TSST task, during which heart rate and the STAI-Y-6 were collected as measures ofstate anxiety and the reversible figure test was used as a measure of attention. Results wereunable to establish a link between attention fatigue and anxiety