Quantitative description of cognitive fatigue in repetitive monotonous tasks

Abstract

There is strong qualitative empirical evidence in the scientific literature that, due to cognitive fatigue, workers performing repetitive and monotonous tasks are characterized by a gradual deterioration in their performance abilities as the time-on-task increases, a phenomenon known as the vigilance decrement. Using a time-dependent Sisyphus random climb model, we provide a quantitative description of this intriguing phenomenon. In particular, we use analytical techniques in order to determine the success probability function $S(t;{\cal N})$ of Sisyphus workers, the time-dependent fraction of workers who succeed, after making $t$ repetitive operations or less, to complete their task by making ${\cal N}$ successful operations in a row without a single fault in between. It is explicitly shown that the functional behavior of the increasing-in-time one-operation tumble probability $1-s(t)$ of exhausted Sisyphus workers may have a dramatic effect on the probability of the workers to achieve their ultimate goal in repetitive monotonous processes. In particular, we prove that the Sisyphus random climb model with the inverse power law functional behavior $s(t)\sim t^{-1/{\cal N}}$ of the one-operation success probability marks the boundary between Sisyphus workers whose success functions $S[t;s(t),{\cal N}]$ approach $1$ asymptotically in time (implying that all the workers eventually complete their task) and Sisyphus workers whose success functions approach an asymptotic value which is less than $1$, in which case some of the exhausted Sisyphus workers never complete their task successfully.