Abstract

In the modern knowledge economy, success demands sustained focus and high cognitive performance. Research suggests that human cognition is linked to a finite resource, and upon its depletion, cognitive functions such as self-control and decision-making may decline. While fatigue, among other factors, affects human activity, how cognitive performance evolves during extended periods of focus remains poorly understood. By analyzing performance of a large cohort answering practice standardized test questions online, we show that accuracy and learning decline as the test session progresses and recover following prolonged breaks. To explain these findings, we hypothesize that answering questions consumes some finite cognitive resources on which performance depends, but these resources recover during breaks between test questions. We propose a dynamic mechanism of the consumption and …

Date

January 1, 1970

Authors

Nathan O Hodas, Jacob Hunter, Stephen J Young, Kristina Lerman

Journal

Journal of Computational Social Science

Volume

1

Issue

2

Pages

295-312

Publisher

Springer Singapore