Gender moderates the association between chronic academic stress with top-down and bottom-up attention

Research on the relationship between chronic stress and cognition is limited by a lack of concurrent measurement of state-anxiety, physiological arousal, and gender. For the first time, we assessed the impact of these factors on top-down/conscious (simple and choice reaction time) and bottom-up/reflexive (saccadic reaction time) measures of attention using CONVIRT virtual-reality cognitive tests. Participants (N = 163) completed measures of academic stress (effort-reward imbalance; ERI) and state-anxiety while heart-rate variability was recorded continuously throughout the experiment. Gender moderated the association between academic stress with the top-down measures (b = -0.002, t = -2.023, p = .045; b = -0.063, t = -3.080, p = .002) and higher academic stress was associated with poorer/slower reaction times only for male participants. For bottom-up attention, heart rate variability moderated the relationship between academic stress and saccadic reaction time (b = 0.092, t = 1.991, p = .048), and only female participants who were more stressed (i.e., ERI ≥ 1) and displayed stronger sympathetic dominance had slower reaction times. Our findings align with emerging evidence that chronic stress is related to hyperarousal in women and cognitive decrements in men. Our findings suggest that higher ERI and sympathetic dominance during cognitive testing was associated with poorer bottom-up attention in women, whereas for men, academic stress was related with poorer top-down attention irrespective of sympathovagal balance. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13414-022-02454-x.