Pessiglione Mathias, Blain Bastien, Wiehler Antonius, Naik Shruti
Motivation, Brain and Behavior team, Paris Brain Institute, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris, France; Sorbonne University, Inserm U1127, CNRS U7225, Paris, France.
Sorbonne Economics Center, Paris School of Economics, Paris, France.
Trends Cogn Sci. 2025 Mar 31. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2025.02.005.
Everybody knows intuitively what mental fatigue is. However, we poorly understand why fatigue emerges with time spent on demanding cognitive work and how such 'cognitive fatigue' impacts neural processing and behavioral guidance. Here, we review experimental investigations that induced cognitive fatigue and recorded its potential markers, including self-report, behavioral performance, economic choice, physiological and neural activity. We then review theoretical models of cognitive fatigue, classically divided into biological and motivational accounts. To explain key observations and reconcile debated theories, we finally propose a conceptual model (dubbed MetaMotiF), in which cognitive fatigue would emerge for biological reasons and yet affect motivational processes that regulate the behavior. More precisely, fatigue would arise from metabolic alterations in cognitive control brain regions, following their excessive mobilization. In turn, these metabolic alterations would increase the cost of cognitive control, which would shift decisions towards actions that require little effort and yield immediate rewards.
每个人凭直觉都知道什么是精神疲劳。然而，我们对为什么随着从事高要求认知工作的时间增加疲劳会出现，以及这种“认知疲劳”如何影响神经处理和行为导向了解甚少。在此，我们回顾了引发认知疲劳并记录其潜在标志物的实验研究，这些标志物包括自我报告、行为表现、经济选择、生理和神经活动。然后我们回顾了认知疲劳的理论模型，传统上分为生物学和动机学解释。为了解释关键观察结果并调和有争议的理论，我们最终提出了一个概念模型（称为MetaMotiF），其中认知疲劳将出于生物学原因出现，但会影响调节行为的动机过程。更确切地说，疲劳将源于认知控制脑区过度调动后的代谢改变。反过来，这些代谢改变会增加认知控制的成本，这将使决策转向需要很少努力并能立即获得奖励的行动。
