Task Engagement, Attention, and Executive Control

There is a conventional tale of stress, attention, and performance that goes as follows. External stressors, such as noise and threat, elevate the general arousal of the cerebral cortex, which in turn impacts the efficiency of information-processing and performance. According to the inverted-U principle, both the excessive arousal evoked by stimulating agents and the under-arousal associated with fatigue and sleep loss lead to impairment of attention. Unfortunately, this simple story is untrue. At the heart of the problem is the complexity of both arousal and attention. In this chapter, we will review the more subtle narrative that is emerging from studies of individual differences in subjective arousal.