Abstract
Mental fatigue is often characterized by reduced motivation for effortful activity and impaired task performance. We used subjective, behavioral (performance), and psychophysiological (P3, pupil diameter) measures during an n-back task to investigate the link between mental fatigue and task disengagement. After 2h, we manipulated the rewards to examine a possible reengagement effect. Analyses showed that, with increasing fatigue and time-on-task, performance, P3 amplitude, and pupil diameter decreased. After increasing the rewards, all measures reverted to higher levels. Multilevel analysis revealed positive correlations between the used measures with time-on-task. We interpret these results as support for a strong link between task disengagement and mental fatigue.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 305-315 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Psychophysiology |
| Volume | 52 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 26 Sept 2014 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Mar 2015 |
Funding
This work was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO; Project 400-08-015). We thank Henk van Steenbergen for his help with the export of the Tobii eye-tracking data to Brain Vision Analyzer.
Keywords
- Fatigue
- Motivation
- P3
- Pupil diameter
- Task engagement