Greater Heart Rate Responses to Acute Stress is Correlated with Worse Performance of Visual Search in Special Police Cadets

Special police often need search targets under stress situation. In this study we investigated the relationship between the autonomic stress response and performance of visual search. Eighty-two male special police cadets were randomly assigned to walk on an aerial robe ladder to induce stress response or walk on a cushion on the ground as control condition. And then participants were asked to completed two visual search tasks including detecting targets (experiment 1) and detecting and identifying targets (expriment 2). We found a negative association between the heart rate of treatment stage and accuracy of the identification task for the participants who were under stress condition. This result suggested that greater autonomic stress response are related with worse performance of visual search in professional working crowed such as special police.

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