Stretch-induced muscle responses under threat vs safety

When in a stressful situation, making fast and accurate decisions is crucial. Previous work has shown that sensorimotor decisions can improve under threat. However, it is unclear if these improvements are achieved by improvements in perceptual or motor performance. Here, we present two hypotheses for how threat might influence motor preparation and use muscular stretch reflexes to test both. The task-unspecific hypothesis predicts that threat promotes motor preparation irrespective of the reach target, through tonic upregulation of the short latency stretch reflex. In contrast, the task-specific hypothesis predicts that threat increases sensory processing for a specific reach target, leading to direction-selective up- and down-regulation of the long latency stretch reflex. Participants were asked to reach to one of two targets that appeared shortly before a perturbation eliciting a stretch reflex, they performed this task either under threat of an electric shock or under safe circumstances. Skin conductance and heart rate results show that the threat manipulation significantly increased sympathetic activation, but not parasympathetic activation. Supporting the task-specific hypothesis, the EMG findings demonstrate a direction-selective modulation of the long-latency response of stretch reflexes, starting ~100 ms after perturbation onset. Our results suggest that stress affects action preparation through upregulation of cortical visuomotor circuits.