In studies of the cognitive processing of idioms, the role of mental imagery in understanding idioms remains a controversial issue. Cacciari and Glucksberg (1995) conducted an experimental study to investigate whether generating mental images of idioms can facilitate their comprehension. Their results appeared to reject both the possible connection between the literal mental image of an idiom a...

Background: Firefighting and rescue require high physical and psychological needs under unpredictable and dangerous conditions. Thus, this study aimed to investigate mental workload and affecting factors in firefighters. Materials and Methods: This is a descriptive study which was conducted on 250 firefighters of Tehran, Iran. National Aeronautics and Space Administration Task Load Index (NASA...

Task-evoked pupil response (TEPR) has been extensively studied and well proven to be sensitive to mental workload changes. We aimed to explore how TEPR reflects mental workload changes in a surgical environment. We conducted a simulated surgical task that has 3 different subtasks with different levels of motor precision and different mental workload requirements. We found a significant effect a...

Although mental fatigue is a complex, multi-facetted state that involves changes in motivation, cognition, and mood, one of its main characteristics is reduced task engagement. Despite its relevance for performance and safety, knowledge about the underlying neurocognitive processes in mental fatigue is still limited. Inspired by the idea that central norepinephrine plays an important role in re...

Our eyes are always in motion. Even during periods of relative fixation we produce so-called 'fixational eye movements', which include microsaccades, drift and tremor. Mental fatigue can modulate saccade dynamics, but its effects on microsaccades and drift are unknown. Here we asked human subjects to perform a prolonged and demanding visual search task (a simplified air traffic control task), w...

Task interruption often has a significant negative impact on a user’s productivity and affective state. Cognitive theorists have argued that interrupting the execution of primary tasks at moments of lower mental workload would mitigate effects of interruption, yet knowing just where these moments occur remains elusive. In this article, we present empirical results from three user experiments ai...

OBJECTIVE The authors used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate brain activation in patients with schizophrenia and major depression while they performed two tasks-a vigilance task and a mental arithmetic task-that differed in cognitive complexity. METHOD In the vigilance task, the participants had to press a response button whenever a specific number was seen on a scre...

Previous studies have suggested that decision aid support can positively affect performance on dynamic decision making tasks. However, few studies have examined the effects of decision aid support on the cognitive mechanisms underpinning performance. This study tested the relationships between decision aid support (in the form of causal loop diagrams), task complexity, cognitive load, mental mo...

The impairing effects of mental fatigue on visual sustained attention were assessed by event-related potentials (ERPs). Subjects performed a dual visual task, which includes a continuous tracking task (primary task) and a random signal detection task (secondary task), for 63 minutes nonstop in order to elicit ERPs. In this period, the data such as subjective levels of mental fatigue, behavioral...