Modulation of visuospatial attention at rest and during physical exercise: Gender differences

This study investigated gender differences in orienting and focusing visual attention at rest and under submaximal physical load. In two discriminative reaction time (RT) experiments, spatial cues of different size and compound stimuli with local and global target features were employed, and the demands on endogenous attentional control were manipulated by varying the probability that cue meaning matched cue position. Results demonstrated females' worse RT performance as compared to males both at rest and under physical load. At rest, females were also less able than males to endogenously override the automatic orienting of attention elicited by peripheral misleading cues, whereas they succeeded in performing it under physical load.