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Does Acute Stress Impact ERP Measures of Selective Attention in a Hillyard Dichotic Listening Task?

Poster Session F - Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Ryan Giuliano¹ (), Mohammad Soleyman Nejad¹, Leslie Roos¹; ¹University of Manitoba

A burgeoning field of research on the effects of acute stress on event-related potentials (ERPs) is revealing subtle impacts of stress reactivity on human cognition. With respect to selection attention, however, results are mixed; some work suggests that acute stress decreases the filtering of distractors, other work suggests that acute stress facilitates target selection, and yet other work suggests acute stress has no impact on select attention. Here, we examine the effects of acute stress on ERPs elicited during a classic dichotic story listening task (e.g., Hillyard et al., 1973) to isolate the effects of acute stress on to-be-attended and to-be-ignored sounds. Adult undergraduate students were randomly assigned to complete the Trier Social Stress Test (n=50) or a Control task (n=50), immediately followed by the dichotic listening task. EEG was recorded throughout the laboratory visit, along with electrocardiogram measures of cardiac reactivity and periodic samples of saliva to assess Cortisol reactivity. Analyses will examine whether aspects of the auditory ERP differ between the Stress and Control groups, as mean amplitudes of the P1, N1, and P3 elicited by to-be-attended (i.e., target selection) and to-be-ignored (i.e., distractor suppression) auditory probes embedded in the listening task. Based on previous results, we predict that the Stress group will show an enhancement of ERPs elicited by distractors, leading to an overall reduction in effects of selective attention on targets relative to distractors. We will follow this up with an examination of whether individual differences in stress reactivity contribute to stress-related impacts on ERPs.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Auditory