Yerkes-Dodson law

According to the Yerkes-Dodson Law performance increases as does cognitive arousal but only to a certain point.

According to Yerkes-Dodson law, an optimal level of arousal is necessary to best complete a task such as an exam, performance, or competitive event.

Similarly, the Yerkes-Dodson law describes physiological or mental arousal first strengthening and then crowding out productivity over short time scales.

The Yerkes-Dodson law predicts that arousal will be optimal at moderate levels - performance will be poor when one is over- or under-aroused.

Along with John D. Dodson, Yerkes developed the Yerkes-Dodson law relating arousal to performance.

High-energy block comes from an excess of anxiety, thereby demonstrating something called the Yerkes-Dodson law, which Flaherty describes as "venerable," although it was a small revelation to me.

The Yerkes-Dodson law is an empirical relationship between arousal and performance, originally developed by psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson in 1908.

This can be seen to be in accordance with the Yerkes-Dodson law if it is assumed that more difficult tasks are those which require greater attentional capacity (c.f. Kahneman, 1973).

Although the inverted-U and the more specific Yerkes-Dodson law were initially related to task performance generally, they have frequently been assumed to predict the same pattern of results with performance in memory tasks.

Adventurous experiences create psychological and physiological arousal, which can be interpreted as negative (e.g. fear) or positive (e.g. flow), and which can be detrimental as stated by the Yerkes-Dodson law.

Although the Yerkes-Dodson law appears to be able to make more detailed predictions than the simple inverted-U relationship, a major problem in testing the Yerkes-Dodson law is to decide a priori which of two tasks is the more demanding.

Although the Yerkes-Dodson law provides an additional prediction which can be tested, it suffers firstly from the problem that it is often impossible to define task difficulty a priori and secondly that even when this is done successfully it is very hard to be sure that task difficulty does not itself affect arousal.