Abstract
Psychological fatigue effects, while they presumably result from some changes in the central nervous system, may best be defined today as performance loss over time when respiratory, circulatory and musculature disfunctioning are not involved. Most research recently on psychological fatigue has been under the rubric of “vigilence” where the worker is generally passive. Much procedural work (repetitive with low energy expenditure) involves activity which over a period of time may have fatigue performance effects as well as being boring. Two experiments were carried out on thirty and twenty subjects performing arithmetic for three hours. In one study three groups of matched subjects had no rest periods, passive rest or active rest periods. Active rest was superior to the other conditions. In the other study no rest was used, but one of two groups of matched subjects was rotated to a non-arithmetic clerical task briefly. This change-of-task produced reduced fatigue effects.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.