Breaking the Camel's Back: Can Cognitive Overload be Quantified in the Human Brain?

Abstract

Reductionism lies at the heart of science, yet this pre-occupation with the <i>trees</i> may mean that cognitive science is missing the <i>forest</i>. Based on the assumption that individual cognitive and perceptual processes interact to form bottle-necks of processing, which, in turn, have measurable detrimental effects on human performance, whole-head continuous EEG was recorded as participants undertook baseline, mild cognitive load and heavy cognitive load tasks. Behavioral measures (reaction times and error rates) showed significant performance decrements between the mild and heavy cognitive load conditions. Graph analysis and pattern identification was then used to identify a sub-set of cortical locations reflecting significant, measurable neural differences between the mild and heavy cognitive load states. This thus lays the foundation for future research into suitable metrics for more accurately measuring degree of global cognitive load as well as practical applications such as developing simple devices for measuring cognitive load in real time.