Abstract
Heart Rate Variability (HRV) has been suggested as a useful tool to assess fatigue-sensitive psychological operations. The present study uses a between and within-subject design with a cognitively demanding task and a documentary viewing condition, to examine the temporal profile of HRV during reactivity, Time-on-Task (ToT), and recovery. In the cognitive task group, participants worked on a bimodal 2-back task with a game-like character (the Gatekeeper task) for about 1.5 hours, followed by a 12-minute break, and a post-break block of performance (about 18 min). In the other group, participants watched documentaries. We hypothesized an increasing vagal-mediated HRV as a function of Time spent on the Gatekeeper task and no HRV change in the documentary viewing group. We also analyzed the trial-based post-response cardiac activity as a physiological associate of task-related motivation. Relative to the documentary-viewing, ToT was associated with an elevated level of subjective fatigue, decreased heart rate, and increased HRV, particularly in the vagal-mediated components. Based on fatigued participants’ post-error cardiac slowing, and post-error reaction time analyses, we found no evidence for motivation deficits. The present findings suggest that the parasympathetic branch of the autonomous nervous system functioning as a relaxation system tends to be activated under increasing mental fatigue. In addition, the study shows that many HRV indices also seem to change when individuals are engaged in a prolonged, less fatiguing activity (e.g. documentary viewing). This finding emphasizes the relevance of comparisons/control conditions in ToT experiments.
Highlights
IntroductionHeart rate variability under fatigue reduced performance efficiency and an increased number of errors
A higher vagal tone has been associated with Default Mode Network (DMN) activation in a previous study [74] suggesting that the recovery-related change we found in vagal mediated Heart Rate Variability (HRV) may belong to those functional changes that contribute to an effective restoration
To summarize the main findings of the present study, we showed that Time-on-Task on a dual 2-back task with a game-like character was associated with an elevated level of subjective fatigue and, concurrently, with decreased heart rate as well as increased HRV
Summary
Heart rate variability under fatigue reduced performance efficiency and an increased number of errors [4, 5]) From this perspective, it is understandable why several previous studies have explored the association between mental fatigue and Heart Rate Variability (HRV). HRV is an index of cardiac autonomic regulation (i.e. the variability in intervals between successive heartbeats) that can be linked to many brain areas [6] and various psychological phenomena including many that have been associated with fatigue. Of the different HRV components, the vagal mediated components seem to be associated with structural variations in the striatal and limbic structures suggesting that these brain areas may serve as important anatomical basis of parasympathetic autonomic modulation [7]
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