Relevance: Knowledge workers are prone to mental fatigue, especially in digital work involving prolonged periods of high mental workload or tightly scheduled video meetings. However, research on mental fatigue originates from psychology, focusing on pathological conditions, and few tools have been adapted to the knowledge work context or to temporary, time-on-task-induced mental fatigue and exhaustion.

Objective: In this master’s/bachelor’s thesis, you will develop an experimental task designed to induce mental fatigue over time and measure it continuously based on participants' choice reaction times.

Description: Your work will begin with researching existing tests and tasks used to assess cognitive function (e.g., CANTAB), and mental fatigue. Further you will investigate the concept of choice-reaction-time and link it with cognitive function/mental fatigue to establish a theoretical foundation for the task. Next, you will implement it in the Python framework oTree, requiring also Java Script and html. You will validate the choice-reaction-time task through a short pilot study (participants = friends & family). To this end you compare the performance over time in the developed task with the performance in established mental fatigue inducing tasks (i.e. sustained attention tasks, which probably also require implementation). Furthermore, the task performance over time will be contextualized with questionnaire-based self-assessment of mental fatigue, and optionally with physiological data (e.g., ECG, EEG, Eye Tracking).

Requirements:

• Obligatory: Python, JS
• Preferred but not necessary: Git; Python-Frameworks: Pandas, Otree, neurkit2; html

Thesis language: german or english