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Poster F in Poster Session F: Thursday, August 6, 1:45 – 3:30 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Task-irrelevant physical effort exertion boosts arousal and facilitates latent state update

Haoxue Fan¹; ¹Brown University

Presenter: Haoxue Fan

Adapting to dynamic environments requires inferring and updating "latent states"—internal representation of task rules—to leverage prior knowledge and avoid costly relearning. While the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine (LC-NE) system is hypothesized to facilitate latent state transitions, a causal link remains elusive. We tested whether manipulating arousal through physical effort (5% vs. 60% maximum grip force) influences participant’s ability to adapt to unsignalled transitions in a spatial predictive-inference task. Our preliminary results confirmed that high physical effort condition led to increased arousal, as indexed by pupil diameter. The high effort intervention also led to better performance after state transitions in the predictive inference task, providing some support for a causal role of arousal in this process. Ongoing work is testing the reliability and robustness of these findings in a larger scale.

Topic Area: Decision-Making, Cognitive Control & Event Cognition