Congrats to First Author Sarah Stoll!

Our collaborative paper combining psychosocial stress-related (AG Pruessner) and motor-cognitive (AG Randerath) research is now available in Scientific Reports!

extracts from the manuscript in scientific reports:

Selective effects of psychosocial stress on plan based movement selection by Sarah E. M. Stoll, Leonie Mack, Jean P. P. Scheib, Jens Pruessner & Jennifer Randerath in Scientific Reports volume 12, Article number: 5401 (2022)

'Motor-cognitive behavior frequently occurs in the presence of a stressful environment, for example when operating a car in dense traffic, observed by possibly impatient other drivers while trying to reach a destination on time..... Stress and its effects might play a considerable role in the performance of such motor-cognitive tasks. ....We investigated how acute social-evaluative stress may affect the performance in humans of relatively simple grasping movements. ...Humans may use different approaches to action when it comes to movement selection (e.g. choosing how to grasp an object). Two prominent approaches to movement selection are rule- and plan-based approaches. Our results indicate that rule-based movement selection might be rather resistant towards psychosocial stress-induced changes in physiological parameters (e.g. heart rate variability), whereas plan-based movement selection might be prone to effects of psychosocial stress. ..hence the applied strategy to movement selection could be decisive when it comes to the vulnerability of motor-cognitive processes towards psychosocial stress.'