COGNITIVE CHANGE IN SPECIAL FORCES PERSONNELFOLLOWING STRESSFUL SURVIVAL TRAINING

摘要

Understanding the deterioration in cognitive functioning produced by stress continues to gain inimportance due to the increasing demands imposed by technologically sophisticated systems.Although the general deleterious effects of stress are well established, the relative sensitivity ofdifferent cognitive functions to stress and the pattern of cognitive recovery with rest have not beenfully distinguished. In this paper, we examined the cognitive performance of Special Forcessoldiers immediately prior to and immediately following one week of Survival, Evasion,Resistance and Escape (SERE) School training at Ft. Bragg, NC. Post-stress cognitiveperformance was characterized by significantly increased response time with minimal change inresponse accuracy. While response time increased for all tasks, memory appears to be mostsensitive to stress. Performance returned to pre-stress levels the next morning following one nightof sleep. The tasks affected most in the current study differed from changes which followprimarily upon physical stress, implying that the effects of combined psychological and physicalstress on cognitive performance differ substantively from the effects of physical demand alone.