Event-related Potentials Research On Mental Fatigue Caused By Knowledge Work

The era of knowledge economy makes the importance of knowledge work more and more significant. Improving the efficiency of knowledge work has become an important source of competitiveness of enterprises, and the main task of current economic and social development. Factors affecting the efficiency of knowledge work are divided into two major categories named subjective factors and object factors. However the current research on knowledge work focus on object factors and some subjective factors such as competence, lack of the research on the psychological state of knowledge workers. Even the enterprises and workers don’t pay enough attention to it.Mental fatigue is an important performance of psychological state. It’s one of the important factors that affect the efficiency of knowledge work. And long-term mental fatigue will have a significant impact on people’s mental health. However, most of the existing research on mental fatigue stays on the description of the phenomenon, lacking of strong theoretical support. The most important reason is the lack of a objective assessment on the early stage of mental fatigue. In this paper, first we determine the concepts related with the knowledge work and mental fatigue based on the existing research of them to provide the theory basis for the subsequent experiment design; Second, this paper tries to introduce the core technology named the Event-Related Potential (known as ERP)for a more detailed presentation; The next work is to explore the objective evaluation index for the mental fatigue caused by the knowledge work, and verify the influence of the mental fatigue caused by the knowledge work to the work efficiency. The research method is the brain electrical experiment and the behavior experiment. The brain electrical experiment adopts oddball classical experimental paradigm to induce cognitive potential P300and extracts data by accompanying software of the electroencephalograph; The behavior experiment uses the random addition lasting for three hours to induce mental fatigue. We uses the data processing software SPSS to compare the differences between the brain electrical data and the reaction time data of the oddball experiment before and after the behavior experiment, and we analyze the changing conditions of the reaction time in the behavior experiment. We obtain the relevant conclusions mainly through comparing and analyzing the variances of the data of ERP P300and reaction time from the brain electrical experiment and the behavior experiment. Finally, we proposes the shortcomings of this research, and prospects the further study in the future.