AI Insight
This study investigated how cardiac cycles and acute stress influence decision-making biases in a weapon identification task. Researchers found that both systolic heart phase (when the heart contracts) and acute stress from cold water exposure independently increased the influence of task-irrelevant emotional and spatial information on participants' responses. Importantly, these two factors did not interact with each other, suggesting they affect decision-making through separate physiological mechanisms.
Why it matters
The findings help explain how stress and internal bodily signals can amplify biases in split-second decisions, such as misidentifying objects as weapons. This has implications for understanding and potentially mitigating errors in high-stress occupations like law enforcement, where rapid threat assessments under pressure can have serious consequences.
Understand the Science
⚠️ Preprint – Noch nicht peer-reviewed
Dieser Artikel wurde noch nicht von unabhängigen Experten begutachtet. Die Ergebnisse sind vorläufig und sollten mit Vorsicht interpretiert werden.
Threatening situations often require rapid decisions which are particularly susceptible to response bias. The perception of threat also elicits an acute stress reaction, assumed to promote automatic action tendencies via several mechanisms. Cardioafferent signals during systole, for example, increase racially biased misidentifications of tools as weapons. Acute stress, linked to threat-biased decisions may both bias such decisions directly and alter cardiac effects on them. Here, we investigated the effects of cardiac phase and acute stress in a combined Weapon Identification and Simon Task. Thirty-one participants classified laterally or vertically presented weapons and tools with lateralized responses, such that target location and prime emotion provided task-irrelevant spatial and affective information. Target onsets were timed to systole or diastole, and in separate sessions participants were exposed to repeated feet cold pressor tests (CPT) and a warm-water control condition. The CPT reliably increased subjective, cardiovascular, and endocrine stress measures. Both systolic target onsets and CPT exposure strengthened the influence of emotional primes on weapon and tool classification, without evidence for general threat prioritization. For spatial compatibility, acute stress enlarged the Simon effect in sensitivity among fast responses, consistent with stronger initial automatic activation, and cardiac phase modulated the advantage of spatial correspondence over locations without dimensional overlap. Midfrontal theta showed prime-dependent target modulations with distinct patterns for cardiac phase and stress. Cardiac phase and stress did not interact, consistent with independent contributions rather than amplification or attenuation. Together, the findings indicate that acute stress and phasic cardioafferent signals both increase the influence of task-irrelevant affective and spatial information on action through partly distinct processes.