“Shifts in attention during mental fatigue: Evidence from subjective, behavioral, physiological, and eye-tracking data”: Correction to Hopstaken et al. (2016).

Abstract

Reports an error in "Shifts in attention during mental fatigue: Evidence from subjective, behavioral, physiological, and eye-tracking data" by Jesper F. Hopstaken, Dimitri van der Linden, Arnold B. Bakker, Michiel A. J. Kompier and Yik Kiu Leung (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2016[Jun], Vol 42[6], 878-889). In the article, there were formatting errors in columns 1 through 8 of Table 2. The correct table is present in the erratum. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2016-01220-001.) There is an increasing amount of evidence that during mental fatigue, shifts in motivation drive performance rather than reductions in finite mental energy. So far, studies that investigated such an approach have mainly focused on cognitive indicators of task engagement that were measured during controlled tasks, offering limited to no alternative stimuli. Therefore it remained unclear whether during fatigue, attention is diverted to stimuli that are unrelated to the task, or whether fatigued individuals still focused on the task but were unable to use their cognitive resources efficiently. With a combination of subjective, EEG, pupil, eye-tracking, and performance measures the present study investigated the influence of mental fatigue on a cognitive task which also contained alternative task-unrelated stimuli. With increasing time-on-task, task engagement and performance decreased, but there was no significant decrease in gaze toward the task-related stimuli. After increasing the task rewards, irrelevant rewarding stimuli where largely ignored, and task engagement and performance were restored, even though participants still reported to be highly fatigued. Overall, these findings support an explanation of less efficient processing of the task that is influenced by motivational cost/reward tradeoffs, rather than a depletion of a finite mental energy resource.