The effects of physical tiredness on some cognitive functions

Abstract

Although a significant number of researchers in spite of the large number of scientific papers dealing with various psychological and physiological effects of physical fatigue, there are few works which are considered objective ways of registering the psychological consequences of physical fatigue. This paper represents pilot research with the aim of ascertaining whether physical tiredness significantly affects the occurrence and prominence of some cognitive and executive functions (concentration and inhibition). Conducted on the sample of 41 respondents including the 2nd, 3rd and 4th year Psychology students at the Faculty of Philosophy in Nis, the research consisted of two phases. In order to assess concentration and inhibition, in the first, pre-test phase the respondents were given two tasks - Code Task and Left-Right Task. This was followed by the physical tiring out of the respondents, which consisted of jumping over the skipping rope for 5 minutes. Immediately afterwards, the respondents took part in the second, post-test phase, which included the assessment of cognitive and executive functions by applying the same tasks from the pre-test phase. T-test for dependent samples was used in order to test the existence of significant effects of physical tiredness on concentration and inhibition. The results point to the existence of significant differences between the number of correct and incorrect answers within each research phase (pre-test and post-test) for both functions. However, the results were slightly different when we examined the difference between correct answers in the pre-test and post-test phase and the difference between the number of incorrect answers in the pre-test and post-test phase. Namely, what was noticed is a significant effect of physical tiredness on the concentration, but not on the inhibition. Since it was pilot research, it can be said that the obtained results show that it seems reasonable to examine the influence of physical tiredness on the occurrence and prominence of cognitive and executive functions, but a series of further research is required in order to check more thoroughly the relation between the examined variables. Since the effects of fatigue on individual cognitive and executive functions measured with instruments that were inflicted on the computer and the duration (cognitive tasks) do not exceed 2 minutes, in this paper points to the possibility of constructing fast and flexible software devices to measure some of the consequences of the murder.