Traces of fatigue in an attention dual task

Abstract

Effects of physical effort have been difficult to find in attention tasks for various reasons, such as the activating effect of the laboratory situation or the spare capacity in automated tasks. Instead, a double task, reflecting quantitatively the changes of information processing, is proposed. Thirty minutes after a paced circuit training, a visual-auditory task was presented for 40 min: tachistoscopically presented dot patterns together with high and low tones. This was done at an easy pace, leaving it up to the subject to decide what to reproduce, as in normal circumstances. No effect was found in the total correct scores or in the auditory task. Deterioration was found only in the more difficult part of the visual task. The results can be explained in terms of Kahneman’s variable-allocation capacity model. This method seems promising for separating effects on different stages of information processing.