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http://dx.doi.org/10.9718/JBER.2022.43.1.52

Changes in Electrophysiological Activation Due to Different Levels of Cognitive Load  

Kwon, Joo-Hee (Interdisciplinary Program of Biomedical Engineering, Chonnam National University)
Kim, Euijin (Department of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University)
Kim, Jeonghui (Department of Biomedical Engineering, Chonnam National University)
Im, Chang-Hwan (Department of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University)
Kim, Do-Won (Department of Biomedical Engineering, Chonnam National University)
Publication Information
Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research / v.43, no.1, 2022 , pp. 52-60 More about this Journal
Abstract
Purpose: For now, cognitive load is assessed based on survey-based methods, which can be difficult to track the amount of cognitive load in real-time. In this study, we investigated the difference in electrophysiological activation due to different levels of cognitive load not only at sensor-level but also at source-level using electroencephalogram that might be potentially used for quantitative cognitive load evaluation. Materials and Methods: In this study, ten healthy subjects (mean age 24.3 ± 2.1, three female) participated the experiment. All participants performed 4 sessions of n-back task in different difficulties: 0-, 1-, 2-, and 3-back during electroencephalogram recording. For sensor-level analysis, we calculated the event-related potential and event-related spectral perturbation while low resolution brain electromagnetic tomography (LORETA) to estimate the source activation. Each result was compared between different workload conditions using statistical analysis. Results: Statistical results revealed that the accuracy of the task performance was significantly different between different cognitive loads (p = 0.018). The post-hoc analysis confirmed that the accuracy of the 3-back task was significantly decreased compared to 1-back condition (p = 0.018), but not with 2-back condition (p = 0.180). ERP results showed that P300 target amplitude between 1-back and 3-back had a marginal difference in Cz (p = 0.059) and Pz(p = 0.093). A significant inhibition in Cz high-beta activation (p = 0.017) and decrease in source activation of right parahippocampal gyrus was found in 3-back condition compared to 1-back condition (p < 0.05). Conclusion: In this study, we compared the sensor- and source-level differences in electroencephalogram between different levels of cognitive load, that were found to be in line with the previous reports related to cognitive load evaluation. We expect that the outcome of the current study can be used as a feature to establish a quantitative cognitive load assessment system.
Keywords
Cognitive workload; n-back task; Electroencephalogram; Event-related potential; Event-related spectral perturbation; Source activity;
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