Daily arousal variation has little effect on sustained attention performance

Abstract

Sustaining attention is an important cognitive process for everyday functioning and arousal is thought to underpin its performance. Primate studies depict an inverted-u relation between sustained attention and arousal, in which sustained attention performance is most affected at the extreme levels of arousal and peak performance aligns with moderate arousal. Human research findings are, however, inconsistent. This study aimed to investigate the effects of arousal on sustained attention performance in humans using two approaches—a small-N study with an inbuilt replication to test within-participant variation, and a larger sample assessing between-participant variation. The Sustained Attention..