Subjective mental fatigue alters task-related cortical responses
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1
Institute of Neuroscience, University of Louvain, Belgium
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2
Aquitaine Institute for Cognitive and Integrative Neuroscience, University of Bordeaux, France
Prolonged periods of demanding cognitive activity often lead to increased subjective feeling of mental fatigue (MF) and/or performance decrement. This phenomenon is sometimes viewed as a consequence of a disruption of motivational processes. However, in our previous study we did not find any causal relationship between the development of fatigue and alterations in motivational states. The objective of the present study was to further investigate this finding at the neural level. We hypothesized that if MF consists in a loss of motivation, brain regions known to be involved in reward processing and motivation should be specifically disrupted by MF.
Twenty-six healthy participants underwent a fatigue and a control session on different days. In the fatigue session, MF was induced by performing a modified version of the Stroop task during 90 minutes, whereas in the control session, the participants were asked to read online magazines for the same time. The neural effects of MF were measured by means of fMRI during a working memory task (4 x 10 minutes) with block-wise variations in monetary reward.
The fatigue session was successful in inducing both subjective and objective fatigue. Crucially, we found that subjective MF, but not its behavioral manifestations, was associated with the depression of the task-evoked BOLD responses, whereas regions modulated by reward were not specifically affected. In addition, subjective fatigue correlated with a global increase in functional connectivity, particularly in the default mode network.
These results indicate that subjective fatigue is associated with depressed task-specific BOLD responses and cannot be reduced to an alteration of motivational processes. The lack of correlation between decreased task-related BOLD responses and impaired behavioral performance might suggest the existence of compensatory mechanisms which are not observable by fMRI.
Keywords:
Mental Fatigue,
extrinsic motivation,
Brain reward system,
fMRI BOLD,
working memory
Conference:
12th National Congress of the Belgian Society for Neuroscience, Gent, Belgium, 22 May - 22 May, 2017.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Cognition and Behavior
Citation:
Gergelyfi
M,
Solopchuk
O,
Dricot
L,
Jacob
B and
Zénon
A
(2019). Subjective mental fatigue alters task-related cortical responses.
Front. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
12th National Congress of the Belgian Society for Neuroscience.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2017.94.00085
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Received:
23 Apr 2017;
Published Online:
25 Jan 2019.
*
Correspondence:
MD, PhD. Alexandre Zénon, Aquitaine Institute for Cognitive and Integrative Neuroscience, University of Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France, alexandre.zenon@u-bordeaux.fr