EEG as a tool to measure cognitive load while playing Sudoku: A preliminary study

Cognitive load or mental workload in human beings is an important parameter associated with the task being performed. The level of task and the learning curve for any task has a certain cognitive load or mental workload. Apart from causing stress and mental exhaustion, increase in cognitive load beyond a critical limit may affect the performance on the end task. There is a need to explore noninvasive and non- intrusive physiological means of measuring cognitive load to identify the subjective performance and well been. This paper discusses identification of EEG as one of the means, identification of suitable EEG frequency bands and spatial locations to assess the cognitive load based on available literature and also to demonstrate measured load based on an experimental study performed using a commonly played Sudoku game.