Evaluating Cognitive Workload With the Auditory Stroop Task While Using a Lower Limb Prosthesis: a Feasibility Study

This study explored the feasibility of using the auditory Stroop task to assess cognitive workload in a dual-task paradigm. Performance on two tasks-counting backward by 3 and the auditory Stroop task-was measured across two conditions: participants' own passive device and a direct EMGcontrolled (dEMG) device. Results based on individual participants' data indicated that the auditory Stroop task effectively captured more consistent dual-task costs under cognitively demanding conditions, whereas the backward counting task exhibited minimal and less consistent performance deterioration. Participant interviews suggested that the backward counting task might be less sensitive to workload because participants could use strategies, while no strategies were reported for the auditory Stroop task. Although the findings are promising, this study was limited by a small sample size, which precluded statistical analysis. Future research should involve larger samples to confirm the auditory Stroop task's validity for measuring cognitive workload while using a lower limb prosthesis.