Neural based assessment of mind wandering during a fatigueinducing motor task: failure due to fatigue or distraction? Hablani et al. (2019)

I thought this looked more neurophysical than psychological?

Source: 9th International IEEE/EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering (NER)

Date: March 20-23, 2019

URL:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8717037/authors#authors

Neural based assessment of mind wandering during a fatigueinducing motor task: Is task failure due to fatigue or distraction?
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Surbhi Hablani(1), Ciara Marie O'Higgins(2), Declan Walsh(3), Richard B. Reilly(4)

1. Trinity Centre for Bioengineering, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

2. Trinity Centre for Bioengineering, Academic Department of Palliative Medicine, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

3. School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin, Academic Department of Palliative Medicine, University College Dublin, Ireland

4. Trinity Centre for Bioengineering, the School of Engineering and the School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin

Abstract

This study developed a method for investigating mind wandering (MW) in a fatigue-inducing motor task. To develop research protocols to assess fatigue in clinical cohorts, it is important that participants perform the task at hand to the best of their ability and with their complete
attention. Therefore, it is important to know if the participant fails in the task due to fatigue or lack of sustained attention as a result of MW. Two cohorts of 12 healthy controls and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) subjects performed a hand-grip fatigue-inducing motor task while EMG and EEG were simultaneously recorded. Frontal midline theta (FMT) and parietal alpha power were calculated throughout the task. While no significant differences were obtained in the FMT power for both cohorts, significant differences in parietal alpha power for the healthy subjects across the task shows they may have experienced MW unlike CFS subjects, who had to put in consistent effort to sustain attention during the task, which could imply fewer MW events. Assessing MW using EEG can serve as an objective marker for evaluating performance in a task and, for assessing the impact of fatigue on the ability to sustain attention.

 

I would be very interested in reading a full copy of this article, if anyone has managed to get it. There have been very, very few Irish studies on ME/CFS over the years.

 

They're on Twitter. @ReillyNeuralLab

 

I hear it is now available on sci-hub

 

https://sci-hub.se/https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8717037/

Any attempt to develop an objective marker for fatigue is welcome but I find this study confusing.

Did the healthy controls experience mind wandering or not? On the one hand theta activity supposedly showed that both cohorts maintained consistent attention to the task. That would mean no mind wandering, surely?

But then a different measurement, alpha power, supposedly showed healthy controls' minds - but not patients' - wandered. So, which one is it: wandering mind or no wandering mind?

Alpha power in patients had a different pattern. The authors interpreted that as patients finding it "difficult to relax during the task due to concerns regarding performance. Several CFS participants mentioned feeling reluctant to overextend themselves during the task for fear of worsening their fatigue. Hence, to maintain their performance level, they may have experienced more task-related thoughts and fewer MW episodes."

The bit about relaxation seems pure speculation. Also, I would classify worries about overextending to be a form of mind wandering as it's not directly related to performing the motor hand grip task. That's if they were actually thinking those thoughts during the task, not before or after, which isn't clear from the description.

This is interesting though (combined with the brain pictures)

Intuitively it makes sense that we have to put all our limited energy into completing the task at hand and so have no spare energy to have our mind wandering about for the fun of it.

However, my sense is that my mind is actually wandering much more since my ME got more severe (except during severe PEM when my mind goes semi-comatose). Could this be a sign of brain fatiguability? As in the brain simply can't stick to the task at hand because the relevant neurons are exhausted too quickly, but it can wander off to somewhere with sligthly fresher neurons? The brain pacing itself by task-switching? No idea how this fits in with the alpha and theta wave findings in this study. It probably doesn't.