The disappointing lack of correlation between the subjective feelings of cognitive fatigue and objective measures of performance such as response time (RT) and accuracy has hampered research in this area. Intuitively, we feel that performance should decline as cognitive fatigue increases, yet a large body of research shows that this is not the case ( Craig and Cooper, 1992 Stoner, 1996 Torres-Harding and Leonard, 2005). Furthermore, cognitive fatigue is a common sequela following brain injury or disease. In sum, we show the relevance of SDT measures in the understanding of fatigue, thus providing researchers with a new set of tools with which to better understand the nature and consequences of cognitive fatigue.įatigue resulting from cognitive work (cognitive fatigue) is a common experience, caused by tasks that require care and skill such as air traffic control ( Orasanu et al., 2012 Kuo et al., 2017) or driving ( Matthews and Desmond, 2002). Additionally, the overlap and difference in the fMRI results between cognitive fatigue and SDT measures indicate that these measures are related while also separate. These results suggest that SDT measures represent an objective measure of cognitive fatigue. Furthermore, activation in the striatum of the basal ganglia was also related to cognitive fatigue, criterion, and d’. Our results show that both criterion and d’ were correlated with changes in cognitive fatigue: as fatigue increased, subjects became more conservative in their response bias and their perceptual certainty declined. This enabled us to assess not only whether criterion and d’ covary with cognitive fatigue but also whether similar patterns of brain activation underlie cognitive fatigue and SDT measures. We also assessed cognitive fatigue at intervals throughout. We induced fatigue through repetitive performance of the n-back working memory task, while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data was acquired. Here, we investigated cognitive fatigue using SDT. Previous work suggests that the metrics of signal detection theory (SDT)-response bias (criterion) and perceptual certainty ( d’)-may change as a function of fatigue, but no work has yet been done to examine whether these metrics covary with fatigue. Yet, for over 100 years, researchers have been unable to identify an objective, behavioral measure that covaries with the subjective experience of fatigue. When we are fatigued, we feel that our performance is worse than when we are fresh.
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