FriSem

Nastasia Klevak, 2nd-year Ph.D. student advised by Professor Russ Poldrack, Department of Psychology

Title: The Task-Specificity of Cognitive Fatigue

Abstract: Adjusting effort as the environment changes is crucial to pursuing and achieving goals. Similarly, cognitive fatigue has the potential to make certain tasks feel more difficult or almost impossible. Understanding the dynamic relationship between mental effort and cognitive fatigue–and the criteria driving these dynamics–is critical to understanding human behavior. In this work, using a novel task-switching task with an incentive-compatible proxy for cognitive fatigue, we investigate the task-specificity of cognitive fatigue and evaluate potential factors that impact fatigue both positively and negatively. We find some support for prior findings that a decrease in participant performance (and consequently a decrease in task efficacy) corresponds to an increase in subsequent fatigue. Then, we discuss trends that suggest subject performance may improve following a task switch, but only when fatigued to an above-average degree. Finally, we elaborate on future design changes for our task and discuss plans for the next iteration of the study.