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Poster Session C: Friday, August 15, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

The effect of task switching on cognitive fatigue

Nastasia Klevak¹, Joshua W. Buckholtz, Russell A. Poldrack¹; ¹Stanford University

Presenter: Nastasia Klevak

Little is known about how task switching moderates the relationship between cognitive effort and cognitive fatigue. To that end, we developed a novel paradigm using an objective measure of cognitive fatigue—participants' willingness to spend money on rest following periods of cognitive exertion. Across the experiment, epochs characterized by poor performance (“low-efficacy”) were followed by significantly increased cognitive fatigue. This effect was potentiated when subjects anticipated an upcoming task switch. Crucially, the impact of undergoing a task switch on subsequent performance also depended on prior task efficacy: switching into a new task improved performance after low-efficacy epochs but impaired it after high-efficacy epochs. These results use an objective measure to replicate prior findings that cognitive fatigue worsens after low-efficacy tasks. Further, they demonstrate an intriguing role for task-switching in cognitive fatigue. Task-switching is costly to performance only during high-efficacy periods; in low-efficacy periods, undergoing a switch enhances performance. Given the relationship between performance and cognitive fatigue, this also suggests that switching into a new task while in a low-efficacy state improves fatigue. While these relationships must be further examined, our findings implicate strategic task switching as a potentially effective intervention for managing performance declines and fatigue during cognitively demanding tasks.

Topic Area: Predictive Processing & Cognitive Control

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