Changes in Mental Workload and Motor Performance Throughout Multiple Practice Sessions Under Various Levels of Task...

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Motor Learning
• Human Performance

Background:

• Mental workload allocation is crucial for cognitive-motor performance.
• Previous research focused on mental workload during performance, not learning, and rarely manipulated task difficulty.
• Understanding how task difficulty impacts mental workload during learning is essential for optimizing skill acquisition.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the effects of different task difficulty levels on mental workload during cognitive-motor learning.
• To monitor changes in mental workload using electroencephalography (EEG) and perceived demand over four days of practice.
• To determine if task difficulty influences the rate of mental workload reduction and skill acquisition.

Main Methods:

• Participants practiced a cognitive-motor task under two difficulty levels over four days.
• Collected data included perceived task demand, performance metrics, and electroencephalography (EEG) to assess cortical dynamics.
• Analyzed EEG theta and alpha synchrony to index working memory engagement and cortical activation, respectively.

Main Results:

• Self-reported mental workload decreased with practice across both difficulty levels.
• EEG theta synchrony increased, indicating greater working memory engagement, while alpha synchrony decreased, indicating reduced cortical activation.
• Task difficulty correlated with the degree of alpha desynchrony and the theta-alpha ratio, but did not interact with practice days.

Conclusions:

• Brain dynamics, measured by EEG, are sensitive to changes in cognitive workload during motor learning.
• The rate of mental workload refinement during learning was comparable across different task difficulties.
• Task difficulty did not influence the rate of learning-related mental process refinement, contrary to expectations.