Abstract
Accumulating efforts have been made to discover effective solutions for fatigue recovery with the ultimate aim of reducing adverse consequences of mental fatigue in real life. The previously-reported behavioral benefits of physical exercise on mental fatigue recovery prompted us to investigate the restorative effect and reveal the underlying neural mechanisms. Specifically, we introduced an empirical method to investigate the beneficial effect of physical exercise on the reorganization of EEG functional connectivity (FC) in a two-session experiment where one session including a successive 30-min psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) (No-intervention session) compared to an insertion of a mid-task 15-min cycling exercise (Intervention session). EEG FC was obtained from 21 participants and quantitatively assessed via graph theoretical analysis and a classification framework. The findings demonstrated the effectiveness of exercise intervention on behavioral performance as shown in improved reaction time and response accuracy. Although we found significantly altered network alterations towards the end of experiment in both sessions, no significant differences between the two sessions and no interaction between session and time were found in EEG network topology. Further interrogation of functional connectivity through classification analysis showed decreased FC in distributed brain areas, which may lead to the significant reduction of network efficiency in both sessions. Moreover, we showed distinct patterns of FC alterations between the two sessions, indicating different information processing strategies adopted in the intervention session. In sum, these results provide some of the first quantitative insights into the complex neural mechanism of exercise intervention for fatigue recovery and lead a new direction for further application research in real-world situations.
Highlights
E XCESSIVE demands of prolonged daily activities on cognitive systems are associated with mental fatigue, usually manifested as the performance deterioration caused by failure to maintain vigilant attention [1], [2]
Lim and Kwok [9] investigated the effect of rest intervals of 1, 5, or 10 min on mental fatigue during the execution of a 1-hr auditory task, and showed that longer rest break brought greater improvement in reaction time (RT), but a significantly steeper decline in performance was observed in the subsequent task
Ashrafinia et al [17] explored the effect of Pilates exercises on postpartum fatigue, and the results showed physical exercise reduced the level of mental fatigue
Summary
E XCESSIVE demands of prolonged daily activities on cognitive systems are associated with mental fatigue, usually manifested as the performance deterioration caused by failure to maintain vigilant attention [1], [2]. Driving or medical accidents have been consistently revealed to be attributed at least partly to sleepiness and/or fatigue [4], [5]. To reverse these detrimental effects, continuous efforts have been made to investigate the underlying neural mechanism of mental fatigue [6]–[8]. Lim and Kwok [9] investigated the effect of rest intervals of 1, 5, or 10 min on mental fatigue during the execution of a 1-hr auditory task, and showed that longer rest break brought greater improvement in reaction time (RT), but a significantly steeper decline in performance was observed in the subsequent task. Similar results were found by the same group in their recent study of a self-paced blocked symbol decoding task (BSDT) with 12 s or 28 s breaks [10], the implicit
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Schedule a callMore From: IEEE transactions on neural systems and rehabilitation engineering : a publication of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society
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