Behind the Paper

What Affects Our Ability to Keep Performing When Tired?

Fatigue is something we all contend with daily, which for us made the paper very interesting to work on. A takeaway message for me was that some ignoring of fatigue was fine, but ignoring it for too long may make its effect on processing speed less and less ignorable.

Published in General & Internal Medicine and Behavioural Sciences & Psychology

Go to the profile of Raymond Hernandez
Raymond Hernandez
Research Associate, University of Southern California
What Affects Our Ability to Keep Performing When Tired?
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Explore the Research

Nature Publishing Group
Nature Publishing Group Nature Publishing Group

Fatigue and processing speed predict subsequent fatigue override, evidence from a coordinated analysis of six EMA studies

This study analyzes six intensive longitudinal studies with 1,088 participants to test whether fatigue and processing speed predict people’s ability to override fatigue in daily life. Greater-than-usual fatigue and unusually fast processing speed both predict reduced fatigue override in the following hours, and clinical samples show lower override capacity.

People often push through tiredness to meet everyday mental demands, but this ability may have limits. Across six studies involving 1,088 people, participants who felt more fatigued than usual performed slightly worse on a test of mental speed. Greater fatigue and unusually fast performance also predicted a reduced ability to maintain performance when tired in the following hours. These findings suggest that both heightened fatigue and bursts of high mental effort may be early signs that a person will have more difficulty overcoming fatigue later on.

Go to the profile of Raymond Hernandez
Raymond Hernandez
Research Associate, University of Southern California

Follow the Topic

Cognitive Psychology
Humanities and Social Sciences > Behavioral Sciences and Psychology > Cognitive Psychology
Neuropsychology
Humanities and Social Sciences > Behavioral Sciences and Psychology > Biological Psychology > Neuropsychology
Fatigue
Life Sciences > Health Sciences > Clinical Medicine > Diagnosis > Clinical Signs and Symptoms > Fatigue

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