Talk abstracts > Shruti Naik (ICM, Paris)
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Shruti Naik - ICM, Paris
Thursday, June 1st
Talk Session 2: How effort and fatigue affect decision-making
16h - 16h30
Neurophysiology of day-long cognitive work and its impact on economic decisions
Motivation, brain & behavior lab, Paris Brain Institute, Sorbonne Université, Inserm U1127, CNRS U7225, Paris, France
Continuous exertion of cognitive control induces a subjective experience of fatigue, after some time (usually a few hours) that depends on task difficulty, even if performance level is maintained. Although such cognitive fatigue has been studied for more than a century, the underlying neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this talk, I will first present evidence gathered in our lab, using neuro-computational approaches, that fatigue due to day-long exertion of cognitive control makes economic choices more impulsive, in the sense that preferences are shifted towards low-cost options. This increase in choice impulsivity is associated with an accumulation of glutamate in the left lateral prefrontal cortex and to a reduction of fMRI activity in this region during decision-making. I will then present new developments that aim at overcoming limitations of fMRI, by using electroencephalography (EEG) recording, a more portable and time-resolved technique, throughout our day-long protocol for fatigue induction. Preliminary results suggest that trial-by-trial variations in low-frequency EEG activity over prefrontal electrodes might provide a reliable marker of cognitive fatigue, as indexed by the bias towards low-cost options in economic decisions. Finally, I will discuss a potential dissociation between this EEG marker of cognitive fatigue and EEG markers of local sleep, which are also known to vary throughout the day, together with the level of vigilance.
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