Effect of Acute Psychological Stress on Coherent Motion Perception:An Event-Related Potential Study

Objective: To explore the intrinsic ERP features of the effects of acute psychological stress on the processing of coherent motion perception by using a dual-task paradigm. Methods: The mental arithmetic task with uncontrollability and social threat evaluation was used to induce acute psychological stress, and the coherent motion perception was evaluated by using RDK task paradigm. Results: With the increase of coherence ability, the reaction time was gradually shortened and the accuracy was gradually increased; in addition, the latency of the P2 component was gradually shortened. Compared to the control condition, the reaction time of coherent motion perception tasks was shorter, the appearance of P2 component was earlier, the average wave amplitude of the late positive component(LPP) was lower, and the N2 wave amplitude induced by the 0.75 level of coherence was higher under stress condition. Conclusions: There was a positive association between coherence and the processing of coherent motion perception,the attention efficiency was higher when the coherence was greater. Under the stress condition, the processing speed of coherent motion perception was accelerated, and the ability of attention control was enhanced. The results showed that the attention resources were invested earlier in the early stage of coherent motion perception processing, and the inhibition continues of the occipital area was weakened in the late stage.