Key result
Auditory feedback promotes cardiovascular challenge markers during pressurized tasks but shifts toward threat during recovery.
Why the study?
Cardiovascular markers of challenge and threat during pressurized situations have previously only been recorded immediately before or averaged across tasks, leaving in-task fluctuations unexplored.
Does in-task auditory performance-related feedback alter cardiovascular markers of challenge and threat in participants during a pressurized task?
RCT (n=40)
Random number generator
No
Does in-task auditory performance-related feedback alter cardiovascular markers of challenge and threat in participants during a pressurized task?
In-task auditory feedback dynamically promotes cardiovascular markers of a challenge state during pressurized tasks.
May aid acute challenge responses under pressure; hypothesis-generating and should not yet change practice.
Background and Objectives: Individuals evaluate the demands and resources associated with a pressurized situation, which leads to distinct patterns of cardiovascular responses. While it is accepted that cognitive evaluations are updated throughout a pressurized situation, to date, cardiovascular markers have only been recorded immediately before, or averaged across, these situations. Thus, this study examined the influence of in-task performance-related feedback on cardiovascular markers of challenge and threat to explore fluctuations in these markers.Methods and Design: Forty participants completed a pressurized visual search task while cardiovascular markers of challenge and threat were recorded. During the task, participants received either positive or negative feedback via distinct auditory tones to induce a challenge or threat state. Following task completion, cardiovascular markers were recorded during a recovery phase.Results: Participants’ cardiovascular responses changed across the experimental protocol. Specifically, while participants displayed a cardiovascular response more reflective of a challenge state following in-task performance-related feedback, participants exhibited a response more akin to a threat state later during the recovery phase.Conclusions: In-task auditory performance-related feedback promoted cardiovascular markers of a challenge state. These markers fluctuated over the experiment, suggesting that they, and presumably underlying demand and resource evaluations, are relatively dynamic in nature.
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Crowe et al. (2020) conducted an RCT in Healthy volunteers (pressurized task) (n=40). Positive auditory performance-related feedback vs. Negative auditory performance-related feedback was evaluated on Challenge-threat index (CTI) based on cardiac output and total peripheral resistance reactivity. In-task auditory performance-related feedback promoted cardiovascular markers of a challenge state during a pressurized task, though responses shifted toward a threat state during recovery.
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