Choice, Cognition, And Affect During The 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic - Info and Reading Options

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The 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic is an unprecedented event inducing similarly-unprecedented levels of chronic, sustained stress and anxiety on a global scale; thus, the downstream effects of these affective responses on behavior are currently unknown. Previous characterizations of stress and its effects on cognitive performance, using lab inductions of acute stress and measurements of naturally-occurring chronic stress, are arguably of a different magnitude than the intense stress and anxiety induced by the pandemic, due to its life-or-death, quickly changing, pervasive and uncontrollable nature. The current moment is thus a unique opportunity to understand how intense, real-world stress and anxiety influence fundamental cognitive processes, including the ability to flexibly allocate mental resources using cognitive control, and the evaluation of risk and basic construction of value. Understanding how these cognitive abilities and behaviors shift during a pandemic could provide crucial, missing, and foundational information about the human mind and brain under severe stress. Characterizing such effects could prove crucial to the development of strategies, interventions, and policies that address, account for, and mitigate changes in individuals’ choices and cognitive performance in response to intense, real-life, stressors. To study this, we are conducting an experiment on Pavlovia, where U.S.-based participants complete both laboratory-quality behavioral tasks and self-report surveys. In particular, participants will complete a risky decision-making task (Sokol-Hessner et al., 2016) dissociating and quantifying risk attitudes, loss aversion, choice consistency, and context effects, and a cognitive control task measuring proactive versus reactive control (an AX-CPT paradigm; adapted from Gonthier et al., 2016). Performance in both of these tasks has been shown to shift in response to affective and stress influences (e.g., risky decision-making: Sokol-Hessner et al., 2009, 2015a, 2015b, 2016; AX-CPT: Chiew & Braver, 2013, 2014; Yang, Miskovich, & Larson, 2018), but these effects have typically been characterized in the laboratory using experimentally-induced manipulations of affect and stress. In the present study, we propose to examine shifts in decision-making and controlled performance as a function of pandemic-related stress, which we will characterize using a combination of subjective self-report measures and objective measures indexing pandemic progression using epidemiological data. In addition to behavioral task performance, we will obtain self-reported measures of state and trait anxiety, perceived stress, subjective loneliness, and perceptions of the pandemic and its personal risk. Demographic measures including age, gender identity, socio-economic status, race, ethnicity, and state and county location will also be measured. Importantly, we will recruit a sample stratified by state and associated pandemic progression (measured using epidemiological data from state and federal public health agencies) and propose to collect participant data in two phases. In Phase 1, we will collect data every 24 hours over a 20-day period, enabling us to examine whether and how task performance and psychological measures shift across participants as the pandemic progresses over time. Pending funding, Phase 2 will commence immediately after Phase 1 (i.e., 20 days after commencing data collection in Phase 1). Phase 1 participants will be invited to re-enroll in the study and complete task and self-report measures again. Re-enrolled participants will take part in Phase 2 following their participation in Phase 1 as closely as possible (i.e., if a participant was recruited and participated on Day 4 of Phase 1, we will aim to re-enroll them and have them participate on Day 4 of Phase 2).

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