Key result
Young people perform faster on a 160-minute Stroop task compared to middle-aged and older groups.
Why the study?
Cognitive fatigue manifests after long-lasting tasks as increased reaction times, but most studies have focused only on young people.
Does cognitive fatigue during a 160-minute Stroop task manifest differently in young, middle-aged, and older people?
Observational
Does cognitive fatigue during a 160-minute Stroop task manifest differently in young, middle-aged, and older people?
Age and time-on-task have dissociated effects on reaction time distributions during prolonged cognitive tasks, with older adults showing resistance to task monotony.
Answers are grounded in this paper and cite their sources.
May inform age-adjusted cognitive testing protocols; leaves open real-world translation to fatigue or interventions in older adults.
Cognitive fatigue arises after a long-lasting task, as attested by increases in reaction times (RTs). However, most studies have focused on young people. Therefore, we investigated cognitive fatigue through changes in RT distributions in three age groups - young, middle-aged and older – during a 160-minute Stroop task. Task duration was divided into four blocks and the ex-Gaussian parameters (μ, σ, τ) were extracted from individual RT distributions in each time block for each item type. The results showed a significant Group effect on μ. Young people had smaller μ values than the other two groups, meaning that middle-aged and older people performed the whole task slower than young people. By contrast, τ showed no Group effect but increased with Time-on-Task in middle-aged people. Older people did not show τ increase with Time-on-Task, which echoes studies showing some resistance to task monotony in this population. Globally, our results showed dissociated age and Time-on-Task effect on the ex-Gaussian parameters.
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Gilsoul et al. (2023) conducted an observational in Cognitive fatigue. 160-minute Stroop task vs. Young vs middle-aged vs older groups was evaluated on Changes in reaction time distributions (ex-Gaussian parameters μ, σ, τ). A 160-minute Stroop task demonstrated a significant group effect on reaction time parameter μ, with young people performing faster than middle-aged and older groups.
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