Eliciting Sustained Mental Effort Using the Toulouse N-Back Task: Prefrontal Cortex and Pupillary Responses
In safety-critical environments such as piloting or air-traffic control, the study of mental overload is crucial to further reduce accident rates. However, researchers face the complexity of inducing an important amount of mental effort in laboratory cond
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Abstract In safety-critical environments such as piloting or air-traffic control, the study of mental overload is crucial to further reduce accident rates. However, researchers face the complexity of inducing an important amount of mental effort in laboratory conditions. Therefore, we designed a novel paradigm, named “Toulouse N-back Task” (TNT), combining the classical n-back task with a mathematical processing to replicate the multidimensional sustained high mental workload (MW) existing in many complex occupations. Instead of memorizing and comparing unique items, as in classical n-back task, participants have to memorize and to compare the results of mathematics operations. Twenty participants were tested with the TNT under three load factors (n = 0, 1, or 2) with functional Near-InfraRed Spectroscopy (fNIRS) and pupillary measurements. The results revealed that higher difficulty degraded the cognitive performance together with increased prefrontal oxygenation and an increase in pupil diameter. Hence, hemodynamic responses and pupil diameter were sensitive to different levels of TNT’s difficulty. This paradigm could serve as a viable alternative to the classical n-back task and enable the progressive increase of the difficulty, for example, to test “high performer” individuals.
Keywords Neuroergonomics Mental workload Toulouse N-back task Prefrontal cortex Near-infrared spectroscopy Pupillometry
1 Introduction In the neuroscientific literature, one of the most used experimental tasks for the study of working memory (WM) is the n-back task [see 1]. It involves monitoring, updating, and manipulation of information and is assumed to heavily tax several M. Causse (&) V. Peysakhovich K. Mandrick ISAE-SUPAERO (Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace), Toulouse, France e-mail: [email protected] M. Causse Université Laval, Québec, Canada © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 K.S. Hale and K.M. Stanney (eds.), Advances in Neuroergonomics and Cognitive Engineering, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 488, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41691-5_16
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key processes within WM. The parametric modulation of task difficulty via the load factor n 2 {0, 1, 2, 3,…} without modifying the visual input or motor responses made it widely used as a tool to manipulate mental workload in applied studies [e.g., 2–6]. Moreover, cognitive performance during this task is sensitive to several conditions such as stress [7, 8] or fatigue [9]. Implicitly, one considers the WM load during n-back paradigm as a key component and a reasonable approximation of mental workload, which is likely true to some extent. However, when a study requires increasing the information processing demand, which is high in many safety-critical occupations (e.g., aircraft piloting), the n value can be too high (e.g., 3-back) and participants often disengage from the task. Therefore, we designed a novel paradigm, called “Toulouse N-back Task” (TNT), combining the classical n-back task with a mathe
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