Experimental Study Of The Attention Character And Subjective Assessment Methods On Mental Fatigue

Mental fatigue caused by sleep deprivation has an important effect on human's physiological and psychological function, a lot of researches on the topic have been carried out in military and many other special professional areas. At present, there is still not a public, systematic and comprehensive mental fatigue assessment method in the world. Thus, although there are so many researches on mental fatigue, the results don't have comparability. On the basis of this situation, the present study is going to explore the psychological assessment method on mental fatigue, and hope to reach these goals: (1) building the psychological assessment methods and indexes on mental fatigue, which are used to normal, healthy young persones; (2) depicting the specialty and meaning of different methods and indexes assessing mental fatigue; (3) to check up the stability and effect of these different psychological methods and indexes through evaluating mental fatigue of two altitudes.Depending on attention theories and the latest research results in cognitive psychology, three cognitive tests evaluating attention character of mental fatigue were selected and designed at the present study, these tests include: (1) working memory test, (2) Chinese character paired associative test, and (3) non-sense picture recognition test. In addition, depending on the meta-cognitive theory, otherthree test were selected and designed, these tests include: (1) the test of meta-cognitive ability, (2) profile of mood states, POMS, and (3) visual analog scales, VAS.The working memory test includes two kinds of tasks: the letter content paired task and the letter position paired task, and each kind of tasks is set three difficulty degree, low, moderate and high, in term of the working memory load. The letter content paired task is used to evaluate the working memory ability of the left cerebral hemisphere under mental fatigue states, while the letter position paired task is used to evaluate the working memory ability of the right cerebral hemisphere.The Chinese character paired associative test includes two kinds of tasks: the immediate recall test and the delayed recall test. The immediate recall test is used to evaluate the formation and consolidation of the left cerebral hemisphere memory information when mental fatigue occurs. The delayed recall test is used to evaluate the extraction of the left cerebral hemisphere memory information under mental fatigue state.The non-sense picture recognition test also includes two kinds of task: the immediate recall test and the delayed recall test. The immediate recall test is used to evaluate the formation and consolidation of the right cerebral hemisphere memory information while mental fatigue appears. The delayed recall test is used to evaluate the extraction of the right cerebral hemisphere memory information under mental fatigue state.The test of meta-cognitive ability is used to assess whether the meta-cognitive ability to self-monitor overt performance under mental fatigue is similar to the ability under the normal state. If the ability is similar, the subjective reports on themental fatigue are believable. Otherwise, the subjective reports are invalid. The two tests of POMS and VAS are the two tests in common use, and have been used to evaluate the subject's mood states when the mental fatigue appears.Through summarizing the whole research results, we can make these conclusions as below:1 .The psychological assessment methods and indexes on mental fatigue were built in the present study, and were also vertified to be effective.2.Through comparing all these test results between the two altitudes, we find that, mental fatigue has the similar effect on psychological function. There is no significant difference between two altitudes, but the test result of high altitude is inferior to that of plain.3, The research conclusion of attention character assessment on mentalfatigue:(1) Through analyzing the results of the working memory test, we find that the norm...