The Impact of Stress on Thinking
When creating training and development programs designers must pay special attention to cognition. Being frustrated during learning or stressed during a thinking task can be tuned to impede cognitive performance or actually accelerate it. A recent neuroimaging study performed at Rockefeller University offers some specific advice. The study found that prolonged stress (over a period of a month), as measured by perceived stress scale, sharply decreases performance on attention-shifting tasks but does not impair performance on response-reversal tasks.
