State and trait predictors of cognitive responses to acute stress and uncertainty

ABSTRACT

Stress occurs when conditions burden or exceed an individual’s adaptive resources. Military personnel are often tasked with maintaining peak performance under such stressful conditions. Importantly, the effects of stress are nuanced and may vary as a function of individual traits and states. Recent interdisciplinary research has sought to model and identify such relationships. In two previously reported efforts, Soldiers first completed a comprehensive battery of trait assessments across four general domains thought to be predictive of performance: cognitive, health, physical, and social-emotional, and then completed the Decision-Making under Uncertainty and Stress (DeMUS) virtual reality task that probed spatial cognition, memory, and decision-making under stress and variable uncertainty. The present analysis explores whether cognitive, health, physical, and social-emotional trait assessments, as well as physiological state measures, predict or modulate DeMUS performance outcomes under stress. Multiple regression analyses examined the effect of each trait predictor and stress responsiveness on quantitative task performance outcomes. Results revealed that one measure of state stress reactivity, salivary cortisol, predicted lower recognition memory sensitivity. Further, trait measures of healthy eating, agility, flexibility, cognitive updating, and positive emotion predicted enhanced spatial orienting and decision-making performance and confidence. Together, the results suggest that select individual states and traits may predict cognition under stress. Future research should expand to ecologically relevant military stressors during training and operations.

KEYWORDS:

• Stress responsivity
• memory
• spatial cognition
• decision making
• prediction

Acknowledgments

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not reflect the official policies or positions of the Department of Army, the Department of Defense, or any other department or agency of the U.S. government. Approved for public release.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, GEG, following data deidentification.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the U.S. Army DEVCOM Soldier Center and the Measuring and Advancing Soldier Tactical Readiness and Effectiveness (MASTR-E) program, under a cooperative agreement [W911QY-19-02-0003] with Tufts University.