How stress affects functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) measurements of mental workload

Alsuraykh, Norah H.; Maior, Horia A.; Wilson, Max L.; Tennent, Paul; Sharples, Sarah

Abstract

Recent work has demonstrated that functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy has the potential to measure changes in Mental Workload with increasing ecological validity. It is not clear, however, whether these measurements are affected by anxiety and stress of the workload, where our informal observations see some participants enjoying the workload and succeeding in tasks, while others worry and struggle with the tasks. This research evaluated the effects of stress on fNIRS measurements and performance, using the Montreal Imaging Stress Task to manipulate the experience of stress. While our results largely support this hypothesis, our conclusions were undermined by data from the Rest condition, which indicated that Mental Workload and Stress were often higher than during tasks. We hypothesize that participants were experiencing anxiety in anticipation of subsequent stress tasks. We discuss this hypothesis and present a revised study designed to better control for this result.

Citation

Alsuraykh, N. H., Maior, H. A., Wilson, M. L., Tennent, P., & Sharples, S. (2018). How stress affects functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) measurements of mental workload. In CHI EA '18 Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3170427.3188646

• Conference Name: CHI 2018: ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Extended Abstracts)
• Start Date: Apr 21, 2018
• End Date: Apr 26, 2018
• Acceptance Date: Feb 12, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Apr 15, 2018
• Publication Date: Apr 3, 2018
• Deposit Date: Mar 26, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 3, 2018
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Book Title: CHI EA '18 Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• ISBN: 978-1-4503-5621-3
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3170427.3188646
• Keywords: fNIRS; BCI; Stress; Mental Workload; SSSQ; MIST; Distress; Engagement; Worry; Anxiety
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/927357