Interactions between Threat and Executive Control in a Virtual Reality Stroop Task

Understanding the ways in which persons rapidly transfer attention between tasks while still retaining ability to perform these tasks is an important area of study. Everyday activities commonly come in the form of emotional distractors. A recently developed Virtual Reality Stroop Task (VRST) allows for assessing neurocognitive and psychophysiological responding while traveling through simulated safe and ambush desert environments as Stroop stimuli appear on the windshield. We evaluated differences in psychophysiological response patterns associated with completion of an affective task alone versus completion of an affective task that also included a Stroop task. The VRST elicited increased heart rate, respiration rate, skin conductance level, and number of spontaneous fluctuations in electrodermal activity. Increased cognitive workload was found to be associated with the more cognitively challenging Stroop conditions which led to an increase in response level. This expands on previous findings and indicates that allocating attention away from the environment and toward Stroop stimuli likely requires greater inhibitory control. This is corroborated by behavioral findings from previous investigations with the VRST. The VRST revealed that the increased difficulty found in tasks like the Stroop interference task directly evoke autonomic changes in psychophysiological arousal beyond the threatening stimuli themselves.