title: Stress intensifies demands on response selection during action cascading processes.
abstract: Stress has been shown to modulate a number of cognitive processes including action control. These functions are important in daily life and are mediated by various cognitive subprocesses. However, it is unknown if stress affects the whole processing cascade, or exerts specific effects on a restricted subset of processes involved in the chaining of actions. We examine the effects of stress on action selection processes in a stop-change paradigm and apply event-related potentials (ERPs) combined with source localization analysis to examine potentially restricted effects of stress on subprocesses mediating action cascading. The results show that attentional selection processes, as well as processes related to allocation of processing resources were not affected by stress. Stress only seems to affect response selection functions during action cascading and leads to slowing of responses when two actions are executed in succession. These changes are related to the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Changes in response selection were predictable on the basis of individual salivary cortisol levels. The results show that stress does not affect the whole processing cascade involved in the cascading of different actions, but seems to exert circumscribed effects on response selection processes which have previously been shown to depend on dopaminergic neural transmission.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, Biopsychology, Ruhr Universität Bochum, Germany; Cognitive Neurophysiology, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, TU Dresden, Germany.
authors.forename: Ali
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Yildiz
authors.affiliation: Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, Cognitive Psychology, Ruhr Universität Bochum, Germany.
authors.forename: Oliver T
authors.initials: OT
authors.lastname: Wolf
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Neurophysiology, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, TU Dresden, Germany. Electronic address: christian.beste@uniklinikum-dresden.de.
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Beste
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003080:Cold Temperature; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D006854:Hydrocortisone / Q000032:analysis*; D008297:Male; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012463:Saliva / Q000737:chemistry; D013312:Stress, Physiological / Q000502:physiology*; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000503:physiopathology*
chemical_list: D006854:Hydrocortisone
keywords: Action cascading; Dopamine; EEG; Response selection; Source localization; Stress