ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Sport Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1611135
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Cognitive Era in Sports Performance: Mental Fatigue, Cognitive Training, Sleep and Psychological Ergogenic Substances-Volume IIView all 8 articles
Mental fatigue impairs endurance performance in a time-to-exhaustion handgrip task: Psychophysiological markers of effort engagement dynamics
Provisionally accepted
Sarvenaz Daneshgar-Pironneau1
Michel Francis Audiffren1*
Abdelrhani BEN RAISS1
Métais Angèle2
Nathalie André1- 1University of Poitiers, Poitiers, France
- 2Université de Nantes, Nantes, Pays de la Loire, France
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Introduction: A growing body of literature showed that mental fatigue induced by an effortful task leads to an impairment in a subsequent physical performance. The principal aim of this experimental study was to reproduce the effect of mental fatigue on endurance performance while investigating the effort deployment in the fatiguing and control tasks that precede the physical task. Methods: Participants performed the following task sequence in a between-subjects design (N = 16 in each group): a time-to-exhaustion handgrip task at 13% of maximal voluntary contraction, a 30-min mental task (Stroop task or documentary watching task) and the handgrip task again. Psychophysiological data were recorded on a continuous basis during the whole experiment. Results: Mental fatigue was induced successfully: behavioral and psychophysiological data suggest gradual disengagement of effort in the fatiguing task but not in the control task (increased reaction time and error rate as the function of time in the Stroop task; higher mid-frontal theta during the Stroop task compared to the control task; decreased stimulus-locked theta rhythm over time during the Stroop task; increased low frequency heart rate variability during the Stroop task). In addition, performance decrement in the time to exhaustion handgrip task was larger after the Stroop task than after the documentary viewing task (d = 0.818). Conclusion: This study highlights the importance of assessing both performance and effort engagement to understand mental fatigue. Despite signs of effort disengagement during the Stroop task, mental fatigue still impaired the subsequent physical performance.
Keywords: Electroencephalography, Executive Function, Heart rate variability, mid-frontal theta, Self-Control, Stroop Test
Received: 13 Apr 2025; Accepted: 03 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Daneshgar-Pironneau, Audiffren, BEN RAISS, Angèle and André. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Michel Francis Audiffren, University of Poitiers, Poitiers, France
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