Influence Of Mental Fatigue On Attention: An ERP Study

In modern society,mental fatigue is one of the most significant reason may cause working accident,which could damage many kinds of cognition function——attention,memory etc——that bring huge loss to the society. So how to evaluate mental fatigue effectively becoming more and more popular. The research begins years ago with a way of subjective evaluation, which has much limitations. Cognition function was Often badly damaged before obviously subjective fatigue.Event-related potential is a new technique reflect cognitive process, which use to research the cognitive ability of the attention before and after mental fatigue in this experiment. Ten male volunteers attended the experiment, recruited from a transportation company in the city of Xi'an, continuously driving task for more than 10 hours to induce mental fatigue. The experiment include two parts:1. Assess the ability of orientating reaction by evoking P3a component of ERPs before and after mental fatigue. 2.Assess pre-attentive ability by evoking MMN component of ERPs before and after mental fatigue. The main conclusions of the present experiment are as follows:1.P3a amplitude significantly decreased after 8 hours continuous driving, but the latency, reaction time and accuracy to the target stimuli has no significant change. The result indicate that 8 hours continuous driving task would seriously damage the ability of orientating reaction, but few change in their cognitive processing speed.2. After 8 hours driving task,the amplitude of MMN significantly decreased, and no change in latency. That means the automatic processing of information was influenced by mental fatigue, the pre-attention was impaired.