Detrimental influence of high neuroticism on visuospatial selective attention: behavioral and ERP evidence

Neuroticism constitutes a risk factor for mood disorders and cognitive impairment, but its impact on visuospatial selective attention remains unclear, especially in young people. Our study aimed to explore the detrimental influence of neuroticism and its underlying electrophysiological mechanisms. Participants (31 with low neuroticism and 31 with high neuroticism) underwent electrocardiogram (EEG) signal acquisition and event-related potentials (ERP) component identification while performing attention search tasks. High-neuroticism participants showed a significant decline in the accuracy relative to the low-neuroticism group. The amplitudes of the N2-posterior contralateral component (N2pc) and sustained posterior contralateral negativity (SPCN) were significantly larger in the high-neuroticism group, indicating dysfunctions in attentional resource allocation and information retention in visual short-term memory (VSTM). Regardless of the electrode site examined, high-neuroticism participants exhibited a larger P3a than those in the low-neuroticism group, which was closely related to their difficulty in disengaging attention from novel stimuli. The amplitude and latency of P3a differed significantly across electrode sites in the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes. P3a latencies gradually increased from the frontal zero (FZ) to the central zero (CZ) site and then to the parietal zero (PZ) site. Meanwhile, P3a amplitudes displayed a statistically significant linear decrease, implying that the frontal lobe activity primarily contributed to the P3a response. Importantly, the interaction between neuroticism and electrode site significantly affected P3b amplitudes. P3b amplitudes exhibited an increasing tendency at PZ in the high-neuroticism group, where it was the largest, but the differences were not statistically significant at FZ and CZ between the two groups. It has concluded that high-neuroticism individuals have difficulty tracking targets. These data suggest that high levels of neuroticism affect the visuospatial selective attention of college students in a multi-dimensional way, presumably due to dysfunctions in attentional resource allocation, information maintenance in VSTM, and attention control.