Does Dysphoria Lead to Divergent Mental Fatigue Effects on a Cognitive Task?

Abstract

ObjectiveTiredness, low energy, and listlessness are common symptoms to be associated with depression. The question remains to what extent these symptoms influence the effects of fatigue on sustained performance tasks, such as impaired task engagement and performance. Based on earlier findings, it was hypothesized that dysphoric (i.e., mildly depressed) individuals, compared to healthy controls, would display earlier fatigue onset and more severe fatigue effects on task engagement and performance during a cognitive task.MethodsSixty-one dysphoric and twenty-one non-dysphoric control participants were compared during one hour of continuous performance on a 2-back task. During the task subjective fatigue, subjective engagement, objective task performance, baseline pupil diameter and stimulus-evoked pupil dilation were measured.ResultsWhile we found that the dysphoric group reported relatively higher subjective fatigue than the healthy control group at the start of the experiment, we did not find any other divergent fatigue effects during the experimental task.ConclusionOne explanation for the absence of divergent effect is that dysphoria may not have such a profound impact on available cognitive resources, like attention, as initially thought. Based on the results of the present study, we conclude that dysphoria is not necessarily an increased risk factor for impaired sustained performance on cognitive tasks that may induce mental fatigue.

Mental fatigue measurement using eye metrics: A systematic literature review

“…Nine of the studies conducted multi-modal measurement of fatigue using EEG (Gergelyfi et al, 2015;Guo et al, 2018;Hopstaken et al, ,2015Hopstaken et al, , , 2015aHopstaken et al, , , 2016Sengupta et al, 2017;Wang et al, 2019), ECG (Abbasi et al, 2018;Horiuchi et al, 2018), and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS; Borragán et al, 2018) and were able to confirm the corresponding measurements of mental fatigue using eyebased metrics.…”

“…In contrast, Song et al (2015) found a negative correlation between the mean blink duration and the fatigue score, although the fatigue score increased with time on a spacecraft-support control task that lasted for 1 hr 45 min. Another inexplicable result is the lack of a pattern for the baseline pupil diameter in one study (Hopstaken et al, 2015b), although the same cognitive task performed for a similar amount of time (~2 hr) in similar experimental conditions resulted in a decrease in the baseline pupil diameter (Hopstaken et al, 2015a(Hopstaken et al, , 2015.…”

“…The analysis of the papers included in this review has shown that the following areas need consideration when measuring mental fatigue using eye-based features: 4.5.1 | Studies with patients Multiple studies have measured mental fatigability and have found it higher in people with depression (Hopstaken et al, 2015), multiple sclerosis (Niepel et al, 2013;de Rodez Benavent et al, 2017), traumatic brain injury (Maruta et al, 2014;Möller et al, 2019), and hearing impairment (McGarrigle et al, 2017a; Wang et al, 2017) compared to healthy controls. Mental fatigability is a problem for these patients as a result of changing neurobiology (Chaudhuri & Behan, 2004), and results in an expeditious feeling of mental fatigue.…”

Mental fatigue prediction during eye-typing

“…At the end of every trial, the participants answered the effort question from NASA—Task Load Index questionnaire (NASA-TLX) on a seven-point Likert scale, by selecting a number using eye-tracking on the on-screen keyboard, in response to the question on the screen, thereby reporting the perceived effort during the trial. Before starting the experiment each day and after every session, a question on the subjective level of fatigue on a seven-point Likert scale was orally answered by the participants [ 16 ]. The experiment design is shown in Fig 2 .…”

“…The effort question from NASA-TLX was selected to focus on the perception of the effort applied by the participants on the tasks. A single-item measure using the word tired was used to define the fatigue level [ 16 , 44 ]. The experiment required cognitive processing, and did not involve any physical activity.…”